Defender of the Innocent: The Casebook of Martin Ehrengraf by Lawrence Block Page A

trial—”
    “But your clients rarely go to trial.”
    “Oh?”
    Crowe hazarded a smile. It looked out of place on his large red face, and after a moment it withdrew. “I’m familiar with your methods, Mr. Ehrengraf,” he said. “Your clients rarely go to trial. You hardly ever show up in a courtroom. You take a case and then something curious happens. The evidence changes, or new evidence is discovered, or someone else confesses, or the murder turns out to be an accident, after all, or—well,
something
always happens.”
    “Truth will out,” Ehrengraf said.
    “Truth or fiction, something happens. Now here I am, plagued by a maniac, and I’ve engaged you to undertake my defense whenever it should become necessary, and it seems to me that by so doing I may bring things to the point where it
won’t
become necessary.”
    Ehrengraf looked at him. A man who would select a suit of that particular shade, he thought, was either color blind or capable of anything.
    “Of course I don’t know what might happen,” Ethan Crowe went on. “Just as hypothesis, Terence might die. Of course, if that happened I wouldn’t have any reason to murder him, and so I wouldn’t come to trial. But that’s just an example. It’s certainly not my business to tell you your business, is it?”
    “Certainly not,” said Martin Ehrengraf.
     
    W hile Terence Reginald Mayhew’s four-room apartment on Chippewa Street was scarcely luxurious, it was by no means the squalid pesthole Ehrengraf had been led to expect. The block, to be sure, was not far removed from slum status. The building itself had certainly seen better days. But the Mayhew apartment itself, occupying the fourth-floor front and looking northward over a group of two-story frame houses, was cozy and comfortable.
    The little lawyer followed Mayhew’s wheelchair down a short hallway and into a book-lined study. A log of wax and compressed sawdust burned in the fireplace. A clock ticked on the mantel. Mayhew turned his wheelchair around, eyed his visitor from head to toe, and made a brisk clucking sound with his tongue. “So you’re his lawyer,” he said. “Not the poor boob who called me a couple of months ago, though. That one kept coming up with threats and I couldn’t help laughing at him. He must have turned purple. When you laugh in a man’s face after he’s made legal threats, he generally turns purple. That’s been my experience. What’s your name again?”
    “Ehrengraf. Martin H. Ehrengraf.”
    “What’s the H. stand for?”
    “Harrod.”
    “Like the king in the Bible?”
    “Like the London department store.” Ehrengraf’s middle name was not Harrod, or Herod either, for that matter. He simply found untruths useful now and then, particularly in response to impertinence.
    “Martin Harrod Ehrengraf,” said Terence Reginald. “Well, you’re quite the dandy, aren’t you? Sorry the place isn’t spiffier but the cleaning woman only comes in once a week and she’s not due until the day after. Not that she’s any great shakes with a dustcloth. Lazy slattern, in my opinion. You want to sit down?”
    “No.”
    “Probably scared to crease your pants.”
    Ehrengraf was wearing a navy suit, a pale-blue velvet vest, a blue shirt, a knit tie, and a pair of cordovan loafers. Mayhew was wearing a disgraceful terrycloth robe and tatty bedroom slippers. He had a scrawny body, a volleyball-shaped head, big guileless blue eyes, and red straw for hair. He was not so much ugly as bizarre; he looked like a cartoonist’s invention. Ehrengraf couldn’t guess old he was—thirty? forty? fifty?—but it didn’t matter. The man was years from dying of old age.
    “Well, aren’t you going to threaten me?”
    “No,” Ehrengraf said.
    “No threats? No hint of bodily harm? No pending lawsuits? No criminal prosecution?”
    “Nothing of the sort.”
    “Well, you’re an improvement on your predecessor,” Mayhew said. “That’s something. Why’d you come here, then?