Ehrengraf for the Defense (9 page)

“I haven’t been charged with murder.”

“But you said—”

“I said I wanted you to defend me against a
homicide charge. But I haven’t been charged yet.”

“I see. Whom have you killed? Let me amend
that. Whom are you supposed to have killed?”

“No one.”

“Oh?”

Ethan Crowe thrust his head forward. “I’ll be
charged with the murder of Terence Reginald Mayhew,” he said,
pronouncing the name with a full measure of loathing. “But I
haven’t been charged yet because the rancid scut’s not dead yet
because I haven’t killed him yet.”

“Mr. Mayhew is alive.”

‘Yes.”

“But you intend to kill him.”

Crowe chose his words carefully. “I expect to
be charged with his murder,” he said at length.

“And you want to arrange your defense in
advance.”

“Yes.”

“You show commendable foresight,” Ehrengraf
said admiringly. He got to his feet and stepped out from behind his
desk. He was a muted symphony of brown. His jacket was a brown
Harris tweed in a herringbone weave, his slacks were cocoa flannel,
his shirt a buttery tan silk, his tie a perfect match for the
slacks with a below-the-knot design of fleur-de-lis in silver
thread. Ehrengraf hadn’t been quite certain about the tie when he
bought it but had since decided it was quite all right. On his
small feet he wore highly polished seamless tan loafers, unadorned
with braids or tassels.

“Foresight,” he repeated. “An unusual quality
in a client, Mr. Crowe, and I can only wish that I met with it more
frequently.” He put the tips of his fingers together and narrowed
his eyes. “Just what is it you wish from me?”

“Your efforts on my behalf, of course.”

“Indeed. Why do you want to kill Mr.
Mayhew?”

“Because he’s driving me crazy.”

“How?”

“He’s playing tricks on me.”

“Tricks? What sort of tricks?”

“Childish tricks,” Ethan Crowe said, and
averted his eyes. “He makes phone calls. He orders things. Last
week he called different florists and sent out hundreds of orders
of flowers to different women all over the city. He’s managed to
get hold of my credit card numbers, and he placed all these orders
in my name and billed them to me. I was able to stop some of the
orders, but by the time I got wind of what he’d done, most of them
had already gone out.”

“Surely you won’t have to pay.”

“It may be easier to pay than to go through
the process of avoiding payment. I don’t know. But that’s just one
example. Another time ambulances and limousines kept coming to my
house. One after the other. And taxicabs, and I don’t know what
else. These vehicles kept arriving from various sources and I kept
having to send them away.”

“I see.”

“And he fills out coupons and orders things
C.O.D. for me. I have to cancel the orders and return the products.
He’s had me join book clubs and record clubs, he’s subscribed me to
every sort of magazine, he’s put me on every sort of mailing list.
Did you know, for example, that there’s an outfit called the
International Society for the Preservation of Wild Mustangs and
Burros?”

“It so happens I’m a member.”

“Well, I’m sure it’s a worthwhile
organization,” Crowe said, “but the point is I’m not interested in
wild mustangs and burros, or even tame ones, but Mayhew made me a
member and pledged a hundred dollars on my behalf, or maybe it was
a thousand dollars, I can’t remember.”

“The exact amount isn’t important at the
moment, Mr. Crowe.”

“He’s driving me crazy!”

“So it would seem. But to kill a man because
of some practical jokes—”

“There’s no end to them. He started doing
this almost two years ago. At first it was completely maddening
because I had no idea what was happening or who was doing this to
me. From time to time he’ll slack off and I’ll think he’s had his
fun and has decided to leave me alone. Then he’ll start up
again.”

“Have you spoken to him?”

“I can’t. He laughs like the lunatic he is
and hangs up on me.”

“Have you confronted him?”

“I can’t. He lives in an apartment downtown
on Chippewa Street. He doesn’t let visitors in and never seems to
leave the place.”

“And you’ve tried the police?”

“They can’t seem to do anything. He just lies
to them, denies all responsibility, tells them it must be someone
else. A very nice policeman told me the only sensible thing I can
do is wait him out. He’ll get tired, he assured me, the man’s
madness will run its course. He’ll decide he’s had his
revenge.”

“And you tried to do that?”

“For a while. When it didn’t work, I engaged
a private detective. He obtained evidence of activities, evidence
that will stand up in court. But attorney convinced me not to press
charges.”

“Why, for heaven’s sake?”

“The man’s a cripple.”

“Your attorney?”

“Certainly not. Mayhew’s a cripple, he’s
confined to a wheelchair. I suppose that’s why he never leaves his
squalid little apartment. But my attorney said I could only charge
him with malicious mischief, which is not the most serious crime in
the book and which sounds rather less serious than it is because it
has the connotation of a child’s impish prank—”

“Yes.”

“—and there we’d be in court, myself a large
man in good physical condition and Mayhew a sniveling cripple in a
wheelchair, and he’d get everyone’s sympathy and undoubtedly be
exonerated of all charges while I’d come off as a bully and a
laughingstock. I couldn’t make charges stand up in criminal court,
and if I sued him I’d probably lose. And even if I won, what could
I possibly collect? The man doesn’t have anything to start
with.”

Ehrengraf nodded thoughtfully. “He blames you
for crippling him?”

“I can’t imagine why. I had never even heard
of him before he started tormenting me, but who knows what a madman
might think? He doesn’t seem to want anything from me. I’ve called
him up, asked him what he wanted, and he laughs and hangs up on
me.”

“And so you’ve decided to kill him.”

“I haven’t said that.”

Ehrengraf sighed. “We’re not in court, Mr.
Crowe, so that sort of technicality’s not important between us.
You’ve implied you intend to kill him.”

“Perhaps.”

“At any rate, that’s the inference I’ve
drawn. I can certainly understand your feelings, but isn’t the
remedy you propose an 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 your
predecessor,” Mayhew said. “That’s something. Why’d you come here,
then? Not to see how the rich folks live. You slumming?”

“No.”

“Because it may be a rundown neighborhood,
but it’s a good apartment. They’d get me out if they could. Rent
control—I’ve been here for ages and my rent’s a pittance. Never
find anything like this for what I can afford to pay. I get checks
every month, you see. Disability. Small trust fund. Doesn’t add up
to much, but I get by. Have the cleaning woman in once a week, pay
the rent, eat decent food. Watch the TV, read my books and
magazines, play my chess games by mail. Neighborhood’s gone down
but I don’t live in the neighborhood. I live in the apartment. All
I get of the neighborhood is seeing it from my window, and if it’s
not fancy that’s all right with me. I’m a cripple, I’m confined to
these four rooms, so what do I care what the neighborhood’s like?
If I was blind I wouldn’t care what color the walls were painted,
would I? The more they take away from you, why, the less vulnerable
you are.”

That last was an interesting thought and
Ehrengraf might have pursued it, but he had other things to pursue.
“My client,” he said. “Ethan Crowe.”

“That warthog.”

“You dislike him?”

“Stupid question, Mr. Lawyer. Of course I
dislike him. I wouldn’t keep putting the wind up him if I thought
the world of him, would I now?”

“You blame him for—”

“For me being a cripple? He didn’t do that to
me. God did.” The volleyball head bounced against the back of the
wheelchair, the wide slash of mouth opened and a cackle of laughter
spilled out. “God did it! I was born this way, you chowderhead.
Ethan Crowe had nothing to do with it.”

“Then—”

“I just hate the man,” Mayhew said. “Who
needs a reason? I saw a preacher on Sunday-morning television; he
stared right into the camera every minute with those great big
eyes, said no one has cause to hate his fellow man. At first it
made me want to retch, but I thought about it, and I’ll be an
anthropoid ape if he’s not right. No one has cause to hate his
fellow man because no one
needs
cause to hate his fellow
man. It’s natural. And it comes natural for me to hate Ethan
Crowe.”

“Have you ever met him?”

“I don’t have to meet him.”

“You just—”

“I just hate him,” Mayhew said, grinning
fiercely, “and I love hating him, and I have heaps of
fun
hating him, and all I have to do is pick up that phone and make him
pay and pay and pay for it.”

“Pay for what?”

“For everything. For being Ethan Crowe. For
the outstanding war debt. For the loaves and the fishes.” The head
bounced back and the insane laugh was repeated. “For Tippecanoe and
Tyler, too. For Tippecanee and Tyler Three.”

“You don’t have very much money,” Ehrengraf
said. “A disability pension, a small income.”

“I have enough. I don’t eat much and I don’t
eat fancy. You probably spend more on clothes than I spend on
everything put together.”

Ehrengraf didn’t doubt that for a moment. “My
client might supplement that income of yours,” he said
thoughtfully.

“You think I’m a blackmailer?”

“I think you might profit by circumstances,
Mr. Mayhew.”

“Fie on it, sir. I’d have no truck with
blackmail. The Mayhews have been whitemailers for generations.”

The conversation continued, but not for long.
It became quite clear to the diminutive attorney that his was a
limited arsenal. He could neither threaten nor bribe to any
purpose. Any number of things might happen to Mayhew, some of them
fatal, but such action seemed wildly disproportionate. This
housebound wretch, this malevolent cripple, had simply not done
enough to warrant such a response. When a child thumbed his nose at
you, you were not supposed to dash its brains out against the curb.
An action ought to bring about a suitable reaction. A thrust should
be countered with an appropriate riposte.