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

most remarkable thing of all.”
    “Oh?”
    “I’m referring to Gates’s confession, of course.”
    “Gates’s confession?”
    “You haven’t heard? Oh, this is rich. Harry Gates is in jail. He went to the police and confessed to murdering Gretchen Protter.”
    “Gates murdered Gretchen Protter?”
    “No question about it. It seems he shot her, used the very same small-caliber automatic pistol that the Mullane woman stole and used to kill herself. He was having an affair with both the women, just as Agnes Mullane said in her suicide note. He heard Protter accuse his wife of infidelity and was afraid Agnes Mullane would find out he’d been carrying on with Gretchen Protter. So he went down there looking to clear the air, and he had the gun along for protection, and—are you sure you didn’t know about this?”
    “Keep talking,” Ehrengraf urged.
    “Well, he found the two of them out cold. At first he thought Gretchen was dead but he saw she was breathing, and he took a raw potato from the refrigerator and used it as a silencer, and he shot Gretchen in the heart. They never found the bullet during postmortem examination because they weren’t looking for it, just assumed massive skull injuries had caused her death. But after he confessed they looked, and there was the bullet right where he said it should be, and Gates is in jail charged with her murder.”
    “Why on earth did he confess?”
    “He was in love with Agnes Mullane,” Cutliffe said. “That’s why he killed Gretchen. Then Agnes Mullane killed herself, taking the blame for a crime Gates committed, and he cracked wide open. Figures her death was some sort of divine retribution, and he has to clear things by paying the price for the Protter woman’s death. The D.A. thinks perhaps he killed them both, faked Agnes Mullane’s confession note, and then couldn’t win the battle with his own conscience. He insists he didn’t, of course, as he insists he didn’t draw nude sketches of either of the women, but it seems there’s some question now about the validity of Agnes Mullane’s suicide note, so it may well turn out that Gates killed her, too. Because if Gates killed Gretchen, why would Agnes have committed suicide?”
    “I’m sure there are any number of possible explanations,” Ehrengraf said, his fingers worrying the tips of his trimmed mustache. “Any number of explanations. Do you know the epitaph Andrew Marvell wrote for a lady?
    “To say—she lived a virgin chaste
    In this age loose and all unlaced;
    Nor was, when vice is so allowed,
    Of virtue or ashamed or proud;
    That her soul was on Heaven so bent,
    No minute but it came and went;
    That, ready her last debt to pay,
    She summed her life every day;
    Modest as morn, as mid-day bright,
    Gentle as evening, cool as night:
    —’Tis true; but all too weakly said;
    ’Twas more significant, she’s dead.
    “She’s dead, Mr. Cutliffe, and we may leave her to heaven, as another poet has said. My client was innocent. That’s the only truly relevant point. My client was innocent.”
    “As you somehow knew all along.”
    “As I knew all along, yes. Yes, indeed, as I knew all along.” Ehrengraf’s fingers drummed the tabletop. “Perhaps you could get our waiter’s eye,” he suggested. “I think I might enjoy another glass of Calvados.”
     

 
    THE E HRENGRAF
    Riposte
----
    “Let Ross, house of Ross, rejoice with Obadiah, and the rankle-dankle fish with hands.”
    —Christopher Smart
     
    M artin Ehrengraf placed his hands on the top of his exceedingly cluttered desk and looked across it. He was seated, while the man at whom he gazed was standing, and indeed looked incapable of remaining still, let alone seating himself on a chair. He was a large man, tall and quite stout, balding, florid of face, with a hawk’s-bill nose and a jutting chin. His hair, combed straight back, was a rich and glossy dark-brown; his bushy eyebrows were salted with gray. His suit, while of a