Defender of the Innocent: The Casebook of Martin Ehrengraf

by Lawrence Block

  “Clete Braden,” Starkey said heavily.

  “—and he began running to his right, and you were running toward him, and he handed the ball to you, and you swept around to the left, after all the Jackals had shifted over to stop Braden’s run to the right.”

  Starkey brightened. “I remember the play,” he said. “The reverse. When it works, it’s one of the prettiest plays in football.”

  “It worked against the Jackals.”

  “I ran it in. Better than sixty yards from scrimmage, and once I was past midfield no one had a shot at me.”

  Ehrengraf beamed. “Ah, yes. The reverse. It is something to see, the reverse.”

  It was a new Blaine Starkey that walked into Martin Ehrengraf’s office. He was dressed differently, for one thing, his double-breasted tan suit clearly the work of an accomplished tailor, his maroon silk shirt open at its flowing collar, his cordovan wing tips buffed to a high sheen. His skin had thrown off the jailhouse pallor and glowed with the ruddy health of a life lived outdoors. There was a sparkle in his eyes, spring in his step, a set to his shoulders. It did the little lawyer’s heart good to see him.

  He was holding a football, passing it from hand to hand as he approached Ehrengraf’s desk. How small it looked, Ehrengraf thought, in those big hands. And with what ease could those hands encircle a throat . . .

  Ehrengraf pushed the thought aside, and his hand went to his necktie. It was his Caedmon Society tie, his inevitable choice on triumphant occasions, and a nice complement to his cocoa brown blazer and fawn slacks.

  “The game ball,” Starkey announced, reaching to place it on the one clear spot on the little lawyer’s cluttered desk. “They gave it to me after Sunday’s game with the Ocelots. See, all the players signed it. All but Cletis Braden, but I don’t guess he’ll be signing too many game balls from here on.”

  “I shouldn’t think so.”

  “And here’s where I wrote something myself,” he said, pointing.

  Ehrengraf read: “To Marty Ehrengraf, who made it all possible. From your buddy, Blaine Starkey.”

  “Marty,” Ehrengraf said.

  Starkey lowered his eyes. “I didn’t know about that,” he admitted. “If people called you Marty or Martin or what. I mean, all I ever called you was ‘Mr. Ehrengraf.’ But with sports memorabilia, people generally like it to look like, you know, like them and the athlete are good buddies. Do they call you Marty?”

  They never had, but Ehrengraf merely smiled at the question and took the ball in his hands. “I shall treasure this,” he said simply.

  “Here’s something else to treasure,” Starkey said. “It’s autographed, too.”

  “Ah,” Ehrengraf said, and took the check, and raised his eyebrows at the amount. It was not the sum he had mentioned at their initial meeting. This had happened before, when a client’s gratitude gave way to innate penuriousness, and Ehrengraf routinely made short work of such attempts to reduce his fee. But this check was for more than he had demanded, and that had not happened before.

  “It’s a bonus,” Starkey said, anticipating the question. “I don’t know if there’s such a thing in your profession. We get them all the time in the NFL. It’s not insulting, is it? Like tipping the owner of the restaurant? Because I surely didn’t intend it that way.”

  Ehrengraf, nonplussed, shook his head. “Money is only insulting,” he managed, “when there’s too little of it.” He beamed, and stowed the check in his wallet.

  “I’ll tell you,” Starkey said, “writing checks isn’t generally my favorite thing in the whole world, but I couldn’t have been happier when I was writing out that one. Couple of weeks ago I was the worst thing since Jack the Ripper, and now I’m everybody’s hero. Who was it said there’s no second half in the game of life?”

  “Scott Fitzgerald wrote something along those lines,” Ehrengraf said, “but I believe he phrased it a little differently.”

  “Well, he was wrong,” Starkey said, “and you proved it. And who would have dreamed it would turn out this way?”

  Ehrengraf smiled.

  “Clete Braden,” Starkey said. “I knew the sonofabitch was after my job, but who’d have guessed he was after my wife, too? I swear I never had a clue those two were slipping around behind my back. It’s still hard to believe Claureen was cheating on me when I wasn’t even on a road trip.”

  “They must have been very clever in their deceit.”

  “But stupid at the same time,” Starkey said. “Taking her to a motel and signing in as Mr. and Mrs. Cleveland Brassman. Same initials, plus he used his own handwriting on the registration card. Made up a fake address but used his real license plate number, just switching two digits around.” He rolled his eyes. “And then leaving a pair of her panties in the room. Where was it they found them? Wedged under the chair cushion or some such?”

  “I believe so.”

  “All that time and the maids never found them. I guess they don’t knock themselves out cleaning the rooms in a place like that, but I’d still have to call it a piece of luck the panties were still there.”

  “Luck,” Ehrengraf agreed.

  “And no question they were hers, either. Matched the ones in her dresser drawer, and had her DNA all over ’em. It’s a wonderful thing, DNA.”

  “A miracle of modern forensic science.”

  “Why’d they even go to a motel in the first place? Why not take her to his place? He wasn’t married, he had women in and out of his apartment all the time.”

  “Perhaps he didn’t want to be seen with her.”

  “Long as I wasn’t the one doing the seeing, what difference could it make?”

  “None,” Ehrengraf said, “unless he was afraid of what people might remember afterward.”

  Starkey thought about that. Then his eyes widened. “He planned it all along,” he said.

  “It certainly seems that way.”

  “Wanted to make damn sure he got my job, by seeing to it that I wasn’t around to compete for it. He didn’t just lose his temper when he smashed her head with that horse. It was all part of the plan—kill her and frame me for it.”

  “Diabolical,” Ehrengraf said.

  “That explains what he wrote on that note,” Starkey said. “The one they found at the very back of her underwear drawer, arranging to meet that last day after practice. ‘Make sure you burn this,’ he wrote. And he didn’t even sign it. But it was in his handwriting.”

  “So the experts say.”

  “And on a piece of his stationery. The top part was torn off, with his name and address on it, but it was the same brand of bond paper. It would have been nice if they could have found the piece he tore off and matched them up, but I guess you can’t have everything.”

  “Perhaps they haven’t looked hard enough,” Ehrengraf murmured. “There was another note as well, as I recall. One that she wrote.”

  “On one of the printed memo slips with her name on it. A little love note from her to him, and he didn’t have the sense to throw it out. Carried it around in his wallet.”

  “It was probably from early in their relationship,” Ehrengraf said, “and very likely he’d forgotten it was there.”

  “He must have. It surprised the hell out of him when the cops went through his wallet and there it was.”

  “I imagine it did.”

  “He must have gone to my house straight from practice. Wouldn’t have been a trick to get her out of her clothes, seeing as he’d been managing that all along. ‘My, Claureen, isn’t that a cute little horse.’ ‘Yes, it’s French, it’s over a hundred years old.’ ‘Is that right? Let me just get the feel of it.’ And that’s the end of Claureen. A shame he didn’t leave a fingerprint or two on the horse just for good measure.”

  “You can’t have everything,” Ehrengraf said. “Wiping his prints off the horse would seem to be one of the few intelligent things Mr. Braden managed. But they can make a good case against him without it. Of course much depends on his choice of an
attorney.”

  “Maybe he’ll call you,” Starkey said with a wink. “But I guess that wouldn’t do him any good, seeing as you only represent the innocent. What I hear, he’s fixing to put together a Proud Crowd of his own. Figure they’ll get him off?”

  “It may be difficult to convict him,” Ehrengraf allowed, “but he’s already been tried and found guilty in the court of public opinion.”

  “The league suspended him, and of course he’s off the Mastodons’ roster. But what’s really amazing is the way everybody’s turned around as far as I’m concerned. Before, I was a man who got away with killing two women, but they could live with that as long as I could put it all together on the field. Then I killed a third woman, and they flat out hated me, and then it turns out I didn’t kill Claureen, I was an innocent man framed for it, and they did a full-scale turnaround, and the talk is maybe I really was innocent those other two times, just the way the two juries decided I was. All of a sudden there’s a whole lot of people telling each other the system works and feeling real good about it.”

  “As well they might,” said Ehrengraf.

  “They cheer you when you catch a pass,” Starkey said philosophically, “and they boo you when you drop one. Except for you, Mr. Ehrengraf, there wasn’t a person around who believed I didn’t do it. But you did, and you figured out how the evidence showed Claureen’s death was accidental. Low blood sugar, too much exercise, and she got dizzy and fell and pulled the horse down on top of her.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then you figured out they’d never buy that, true or false. So you dug deeper.”

  “It was the only chance,” Ehrengraf said modestly.

  “And they might not buy that Claureen killed herself by accident, but they loved the idea that she was cheating on me and Clete killed her so I’d be nailed for it.”

  “The Ehrengraf reverse.”

  “How’s that?”

  “The Ehrengraf reverse. When the evidence is all running one way, you hand off the ball and sweep around the other end.” He spread his hands. “And streak down the sideline and into the end zone.”

  “Touchdown,” Starkey said. “We win, and Braden’s the goat and I’m the hero.”

  “As you clearly were on Sunday.”

  “I guess I had a pretty decent game.”

  “Eight pass receptions, almost two hundred yards rushing—yes, I’d say you had a good game.”

  “Say, were those seats okay?”

  “Row M on the fifty-yard line? They were the best seats in the stadium.”

  “It was a beautiful day for it, too, wasn’t it? And I couldn’t do a thing wrong. Oh, next week I’ll probably fumble three times and run into my own blockers a lot, but I’ll have this one to remember.”

  Ehrengraf took the game ball in his hands. “And so will I,” he said.

  “Well, I wanted you to have a souvenir. And the bonus, well, I got more money coming in these days than I ever figured to see. Every time the phone rings it’s another product endorsement coming my way, and I don’t have to wait too long between rings, either. Hey, speaking of the reverse, how’d you like the one we ran Sunday?”

  “Beautiful,” Ehrengraf said fervently. “A work of art.”

  “You know, I was thinking of you when they called it in the huddle. Fact, when the defense was on the field I asked the coach if we couldn’t run that play. Would have served me right if I’d been dumped for a loss, but that’s not what happened.”

  “You gained forty yards,” Ehrengraf said, “and if that one man hadn’t missed a downfield block, you’d have had another touchdown.”

  “Well, it’s a pretty play,” Blaine Starkey said. “There’s really nothing like the reverse.”

  THE EHRENGRAF

  Settlement

  * * *

  “Let me have men about me that are fat,

  Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights.

  Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look.

  He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.”

  —William Shakespeare

  Ehrengraf, his mind abuzz with uplifting thoughts, left his car at the curb and walked the length of the flagstone path to Millard Ravenstock’s imposing front door. There was a large bronze door-knocker in the shape of an elephant’s head, and one could lift and lower the animal’s hinged proboscis to summon the occupants.

  Or, as an alternative, one could ring the doorbell by pressing the recessed mother-of-pearl button. Ehrengraf fingered the knot in his tie, with its alternating half-inch stripes of scarlet and Prussian blue, and brushed a speck of lint from the lapel of his gray flannel suit. Only then, having given both choices due consideration, did he touch the elephant’s trunk, before opting instead for the bell-push.

  Moments later he was in a paneled library, seated in a leather club chair, with a cup of coffee at hand. He hadn’t managed more than two sips of the coffee before Millard Ravenstock joined him.

  “Mr. Ehrengraf,” the man said, giving the honorific just enough emphasis to suggest how rarely he employed it. Ehrengraf could believe it; this was a man who would call most people by their surnames, as if all the world’s inhabitants were members of his household staff.

  “Mr. Ravenstock,” said Ehrengraf, with an inflection that was similar but not identical.

  “It was good of you to come to see me. In ordinary circumstances I’d have called at your offices, but—”

  A shrug and a smile served to complete the sentence.

  In ordinary circumstances, Ehrengraf thought, the man would not have come to Ehrengraf’s office, because there’d have been no need for their paths to cross. Had Millard Ravenstock not found himself a person of interest in a murder investigation, he’d have had no reason to summon Ehrengraf, or Ehrengraf any reason to come to the imposing Nottingham Terrace residence.

  Ehrengraf simply observed that the circumstances were not ordinary.

  “Indeed they are not,” said Ravenstock. His chalk-striped navy suit was clearly the work of a custom tailor, who’d shown skill in flattering his client’s physique. Ravenstock was an imposing figure of a man, stout enough to draw a physician’s perfunctory warnings about cholesterol and type-two diabetes, but still well on the right side of the current national standard for obesity. Ehrengraf, who maintained an ideal weight with no discernible effort, rather agreed with Shakespeare’s Caesar, liking to have men about him who were fat.

  “‘Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights.’”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Had he spoken aloud? Ehrengraf smiled, and waved a dismissive hand. “Perhaps,” he said, “we should consider the matter that concerns us.”

  “Tegrum Bogue,” Ravenstock said, pronouncing the name with distaste. “What kind of a name is Tegrum Bogue?”

  “A distinctive one,” Ehrengraf suggested.

  “Distinctive if not distinguished. I’ve no quarrel with the surname. One assumes it came down to him from the man who provided half his DNA. But why would anyone name a child Tegrum? With all the combinations of letters available, why pick those six and arrange them in that order?” He frowned. “Never mind, I’m wandering off-topic. What does his name matter? What’s relevant is that I’m about to be charged with his murder.”

  “They allege that you shot him.”

  “And the allegation is entirely true,” Ravenstock said. “I don’t suppose you like to hear me admit as much, Mr. Ehrengraf. But it’s pointless for me to deny it, because it’s the plain and simple truth.”

  Ehrengraf, whose free time was largely devoted to the reading of poetry, moved from Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde, who had pointed out that the truth was rarely plain, and never simple. But he kept himself from quoting aloud.

  “It was self-defense,” Ravenstock said. “The man was hanging around my property and behaving suspiciously. I confronted him. He responded in a menacing fashion. I urged him to depart. He attacked me. Then and only then did I draw my pistol and shoot him d
ead.”

  “Ah,” said Ehrengraf.

  “It was quite clear that I was blameless,” Ravenstock said. His high forehead was dry, but he drew a handkerchief and mopped it just the same. “The police questioned me, as they were unquestionably right to do, and released me, and one detective said offhand that I’d done the right thing. I consulted with my attorney, and he said he doubted charges would be brought, but that if they were he was confident of a verdict of justifiable homicide.”

  “And then things began to go wrong.”

  “Horribly wrong, Mr. Ehrengraf. But you probably know the circumstances as well as I do.”

  “I try to keep up,” Ehrengraf allowed. “But let me confirm a few facts. You’re a member of the Nottingham Vigilance Committee.”

  “The name’s unfortunate,” Ravenstock said. “It simply identifies the group as what it is, designed to keep a watchful eye over our neighborhood. This is an affluent area, and right across the street is Delaware Park. That’s one of the best things about living here, but it’s not an unmixed blessing.”

  “Few blessings are,” said Ehrengraf.

  “I’ll have to think about that. But the park—it’s beautiful, it’s convenient, and at the same time people lurk there, some of them criminous, some of them emotionally disturbed, and all of them just a stone’s throw from our houses.”

  There was a remark that was trying to occur to Ehrengraf, something about glass houses, but he left it unsaid.

  “Police protection is good here,” Ravenstock continued, “but there’s a definite need for a neighborhood watch group. Vigilance—well, you hear that and you think vigilante, don’t you?”

  “One does. This Mr. Bogue—”

  “Tegrum Bogue.”

  “Tegrum Bogue. You’d had confrontations with him before.”

  “I’d seen him on my property once or twice,” Ravenstock said, “and warned him off.”

  “You’d called in reports of his suspicious behavior to the police.”

  “A couple of times, yes.”