Ehrengraf for the Defense (24 page)

“A pair of soiled panties.”

“The pervert. So he had ample reason to pin
the Milf Murder on Bo. To help Millard, and to divert any possible
suspicion from himself. This really is superb coffee.”

“May I bring you a fresh cup?”

“Not quite yet, Martin. Those notebooks of
Bo’s, with the crude drawings and the fantasies? They seemed so
unlikely to me, so much at variance with the Tegrum Bogue I knew,
and well they might have done.”

“They’ve turned out to be forgeries.”

“Rather skillful forgeries,” she said, “but
forgeries all the same. Bainbridge had imitated Bo’s handwriting,
and he’d left behind a notebook in which he’d written out drafts of
the material in his own hand, then practiced copying them in Bo’s.
And do you know what else they found?”

“Something of your husband’s, I believe.”

“Millard supplied those fantasies for
Bainbridge. He wrote them out in his own cramped hand, and gave
them to Bainbridge to save his policeman friend the necessity of
using his imagination. But before he did this he made photocopies,
which he kept. They turned up in a strongbox in his closet, and
they were a perfect match for the originals that had been among
Bainbridge’s effects.”

“Desperate men do desperate things,” he said.
“I’m sure he denies everything.”

“Of course. It won’t do him any good. The
police came out of this looking very bad, and it’s no help to blame
Walter Bainbridge, as he’s beyond their punishment. So they blame
Millard for everything Bainbridge did, and for tempting Bainbridge
in the first place. They were quite rough with him when they
arrested him. You know how on television they always put a hand on
a perpetrator’s head when they’re helping him get into the back
seat of the squad car?”

“So that he won’t bump his head on the
roof.”

“Well, this police detective put his hand on
Millard’s head,” she said, “and then slammed it into the roof.”

“I’ve often wondered if that ever
happens.”

“I saw it happen, Martin. The policeman said
he was sorry.”

“It must have been an accident.”

“Then he did it again.”

“Oh.”

“I wish I had a tape of it,” she said. “I’d
watch it over and over.”

The woman had heart, Ehrengraf marveled. Her
beauty was exceptional, but ultimately it was merely a component of
a truly remarkable spirit. He could think of things to say, but he
was content for now to leave them unsaid, content merely to bask in
the glow of her presence.

And Alicia seemed comfortable with the
silence. Their eyes met, and it seemed to Ehrengraf that their
breathing took on the same cadence, deepening their wordless
intimacy.

“You don’t want more coffee,” he said at
length.

She shook her head.

“The last time you were here—”

“You gave me a Drambuie.”

“Would you like one now?”

“Not just now. Do you know what I almost
suggested last time?”

He did not.

“It was after you’d brought me the Drambuie,
but before I’d tasted it. The thought came to me that we should go
to your bedroom and make love, and afterward we could drink the
Drambuie.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. I knew you wanted me, I could tell by
the way you looked at me.”

“I didn’t mean to stare.”

“I didn’t find it objectionable, Martin. It
wasn’t a coarse or lecherous look. It was admiring. I found it
exciting.”

“I see.”

“Add in the fact that you’re a very
attractive man, Martin, and one in whose presence I feel safe and
secure, and, well, I found myself overcome by a very strong desire
to go to bed with you.”

“My dear lady.”

“But the timing was wrong,” she said. “And
how would you take it? Might it seem like a harlot’s trick to bind
you more strongly to my service? So the moment came and went, and
we drained our little snifters of Drambuie, and I went home to
Nottingham Terrace.”

Ehrengraf waited.

“Now everything’s resolved,” she said. “I
wanted to give you the check first thing, so that would be out of
the way. And we’ve said what we needed to say about my awful
husband and that wretched policeman. And I find I want you more
than ever. And you still want me, don’t you, Martin?”

“More than ever.”

“Afterward,” she said, “we’ll have the
Drambuie.”

The End

In 1978,
Ellery Queen’s Mystery
Magazine
published “The Ehrengraf Defense,” the debut appearance
of the dapper little lawyer who never loses a case. In 1994, Jim
Seels published a deluxe small-press edition of the eight Ehrengraf
stories. Edward D. Hoch, surely the reigning contemporary master of
short crime fiction, provided the following introduction:

When Lawrence Block asked me to prepare this
introduction to his eight stories about criminal lawyer Martin H.
Ehrengraf, I’m sure he was unaware how ironic the request was. Back
in the early 1950s, when I was still struggling to make my first
sale, I began corresponding with Ben Abramson, a bookseller and
Sherlockian who had previously published
The Baker Street
Journal
. I even met with him on one of my trips to New
York.

Abramson had discussed with Fred Dannay (the
half of “Ellery Queen” who was actively editing
Ellery Queen’s
Mystery Magazine
) an idea for a series of stories about a
criminal lawyer, in both senses of the phrase. This lawyer,
patterned after the character of Randolph Mason created in 1896 by
Melville Davisson Post, would be an unscrupulous attorney using the
weaknesses of the law to defeat justice. Dannay was eager to run
such a series, and suggested that Abramson seek out some young
writer to tackle the project.

I had never read any of the Randolph Mason
stories, but armed with a couple of plot suggestions from Ben
Abramson I hurried home to write the first story. I sent the
finished product off to Abramson and he liked it. Fred Dannay
didn’t, and the project quickly died.

A quarter of a century later Lawrence Block
wrote a story about a criminal lawyer named Martin H. Ehrengraf and
submitted it to
EQMM
. “The Ehrengraf Method” (later
reprinted as “The Ehrengraf Defense”) was published in the February
1978 issue of the magazine, with a headnote by Dannay which spoke
of filling the footprints of Post’s Randolph Mason. Like me, Block
had never read the Mason tales, but with the encouragement of Fred
Dannay the new series lasted through eight stories, all but one of
which appeared in
EQMM
. (“The Ehrengraf Appointment” didn’t
quite catch Dannay’s favor, apparently, and found a home in
Mike
Shayne Mystery Magazine
.)

What was there about Martin Ehrengraf, and
Randolph Mason before him, that so fascinated readers? Perhaps it
was the idea of outwitting the law, of finding some clever way
around the firm structures of our legal system. In the first and
best of the Mason books,
The Strange Schemes of Randolph
Mason
(1896), the title character usually springs his surprises
in the courtroom, baffling judge and jury alike as murderers,
forgers and embezzlers walk free. Ehrengraf, on the other hand,
prefers that his cases never even come to trial, that the charges
against his clients be dropped. Ehrengraf says, “I prefer to leave
that to the Perry Masons of the world.” In a later story he
explains, “I’m always happiest when I can save my clients not
merely from prison but from going to trial in the first place.”

Of course Ehrengraf goes further than
Randolph Mason ever did. If Mason might advise a client to commit
murder, and then free him on a technicality, Ehrengraf actually
commits murder himself to aid a client and collect his fee. As
Francis M. Nevins has observed, “(Block’s) protagonist serves
clients not by taking advantage of glitches in the system but by
breaking the law in whatever way will work.” The fact that
Ehrengraf’s felonies usually occur offstage and are only inferred
does little to lessen their effect.

Randolph Mason developed in later stories
into a sort of moral champion, defending clients victimized by
villains using the legal system. Block, in the introduction to his
1983 collection
Sometimes They Bite
, pretty much assures us
that this won’t happen to Ehrengraf. But the dapper little attorney
does love poetry, quoting at times from William Blake, Andrew
Marvell, Christopher Smart, Arthur O’Shaughnessy and others. Like
Shelley he believes that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators
of the universe.” Once he even speaks of himself as a “corrector of
destinies” using the title of the very book in which Randolph Mason
completed his metamorphosis into a force for good.

There has been no new Ehrengraf story now for
ten years. Perhaps the little attorney with the neat mustache and a
liking for poetry really has gone over to the side of rectitude.
But somehow I doubt it.

Lawrence Block was recently a recipient of
the Grand Master award from the Mystery Writers of America, one of
the youngest writers to be so honored. It is a well-deserved
tribute to an author who has proven adept in creating memorable
series characters in both the novel and short story forms. With the
current popularity of both the Matthew Scudder and Bernie
Rhodenbarr novels, along with the Keller short stories, I’m pleased
to see that Ehrengraf hasn’t been forgotten.

Edward D. Hoch

Rochester, NY, 1994

And here’s my afterword to that volume:

Amazing what you find out. To think that Fred
Dannay was once interested in a continuation of Melville Davisson
Post’s Randolph Mason stories! To think that Ed Hoch once undertook
to provide it!

I of course had no idea. When I wrote the
first Ehrengraf story in 1977, I didn’t know anything more about
Melville Davisson Post than his name. Fred Dannay was crazy about
the story, and heralded Ehrengraf as a lineal descendant of
Randolph Mason.

I didn’t know what the hell he was talking
about. And I may have been just a tiny bit sensitive on the
subject. Because, while I hadn’t pilfered any ideas from Post, the
first Ehrengraf story was an example of what I’ve elsewhere called
Creative Plagiarism.

I hadn’t stolen the character. Ehrengraf was
my own creation, sprung from my high forehead like Athena from the
brow of Zeus. No, what I’d stolen was the plot itself.

And not from Melville Davisson Post, either.
I’d lifted it from Fletcher Flora.

I don’t remember the title of the story, or
just where and when it appeared. I’d guess it was published in
Manhunt
, probably in the mid-to-late fifties. While the
details of the story have long since left my memory, I recall that
it concerned a good friend of the narrator, who was in jail,
charged with murdering a young woman. The narrator, operating on
the principle that greater love hath no man than to lay down
someone else’s life for a friend, gets his buddy off the hook by
committing another murder or two with the identical MO. The friend,
securely in jail at the time, has an unshakable alibi, and is thus
off the hook for the first murder, which he did in fact commit.

I read the story, I liked the story, I forgot
about the story, and years later I remembered it again and thought
what a pleasure it would be to write that story. There was only one
problem. Someone had already written it.

So I thought some more about it, and started
poking it and probing it, looking for ways to change it. I decided
that an artful attorney would make a good hero, and it struck me
that he’d be particularly well motivated if he worked, as
negligence lawyers do, upon a contingency basis. Martin Ehrengraf
took shape at once, the minute I started writing the first
paragraph. All his traits and mannerisms were somehow there from
the beginning, as if he’d been waiting patiently for me to sit down
and write about him.

I didn’t intend him as a series character,
but characters have frequently surprised me in this fashion over
the years, and I don’t think a month passed after I’d written the
first Ehrengraf story before I found myself writing a second.

Fred Dannay was the first editor to see the
first Ehrengraf story, and he snapped it up for
EQMM
.
He
wasn’t surprised when there was a second story, and did
indeed hail my little lawyer as the reincarnation of Randolph
Mason, and went on buying the stories as they rolled out of my
typewriter. He passed on one, “The Ehrengraf Appointment”, finding
it too gory for his taste. Rather than rewrite it for him, I sent
it off to
Mike Shayne
, where I sold it for the price of a
dinner, and not a great dinner, either. Fred bought the next one,
and the one after that, and after his death in 1982 Eleanor
Sullivan continued to take what Ehrengraf stories I managed to
write.

But there haven’t been all that many of them.
Early on, Otto Penzler told me he’d like to publish a collection of
the Ehrengraf stories as soon as I got enough of them written to
fill a book. That sounded good to me.

It never happened.

Ehrengraf’s problem, you see, is that he has
a severely limited range. There haven’t been that many story ideas
that have worked for him. I haven’t wanted to write the same story
over and over, and have waited for variations to suggest
themselves. There have thus far been only these eight which appear
together now for the first time.

I can’t tell you there’ll never be another. I
write these lines in May of 1994, the publication month of
The
Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams
, Bernie Rhodenbarr’s first
book-length adventure in over a decade. If Bernie could come back
after so long an absence, I can hardly rule out an eventual future
appearance of the wily Martin Herod (or Harrod) Ehrengraf. I
wouldn’t hold my breath, but I’m not going to say it’ll never
happen.