Ehrengraf for the Defense by Lawrence Block Page A

extreme one? The cure seems worse than the
disease. To expose yourself to a murder trial—”
    “But your clients rarely go to trial.”
    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.
    * * *
    While 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