“You,” said Cutliffe, “are the most astonishingly fortunate lawyer who ever passed the bar.”
“ ‘Dame Fortune is a fickle gypsy, And always blind, and often tipsy,’ ” Ehrengraf quoted. “Winthrop Mackworth Praed, born eighteen-oh-two, died eighteen thirty-nine. But you don’t care for poetry, do you? Perhaps you’d prefer the elder Pliny’s observation upon the eruption of Vesuvius. He said that Fortune favors the brave.”
“A cliché, isn’t it?”
“Perhaps it was rather less a cliché when Pliny said it,” Ehrengraf said gently. “But that’s beside the point. My client was innocent, just as I told you—”
“How on earth could you have known it?”
“I didn’t have to know it. I presumed it, Mr. Cutliffe, as I always presume my clients to be innocent, and as in time they are invariably proven to be. And, because you were so incautious as to insist upon a wager—”
“Insist!”
“It was indeed your suggestion,” Ehrengraf said. “I did not seek you out, Mr. Cutliffe. I did not seat myself unbidden at your table.”
“You came to this restaurant,” Cutliffe said darkly. “You deliberately baited me, goaded me. You—”
“Oh, come now,” Ehrengraf said. “You make me sound like what priests would call an occasion of sin or lawyers an attractive nuisance. I came here for apple pie with cheese, Mr. Cutliffe, and you proposed a wager. Now my client has been released and all charges dropped, and I believe you owe me money.”
“It’s not as if you got him off. Fate got him off.”
Ehrengraf rolled his eyes. “Oh, please, Mr. Cutliffe,” he said. “I’ve had clients take that stance, you know, and they always change their minds in the end. My agreement with them has always been that my fee is due and payable upon their release, whether the case comes to court or not, whether or not I have played any evident part in their salvation. I specified precisely those terms when we arranged our little wager.”
“Of course gambling debts are not legally collectible in this state.”
“Of course they are not, Mr. Cutliffe. Yours is purely a debt of honor, an attribute which you may or may not be said to possess in accordance with your willingness to write out a check. But I trust you are an honorable man, Mr. Cutliffe.”
Their eyes met. After a long moment Cutliffe drew a checkbook from his pocket. “I feel I’ve been manipulated in some devious fashion,” he said, “but at the same time I can’t gloss over the fact that I owe you money.” He opened the checkbook, uncapped a pen, and filled out the check quickly, signing it with a flourish. Ehrengraf smiled narrowly, placing the check in his own wallet without noting the amount. It was, let it be said, an impressive amount.
“An astonishing case,” Cutliffe said, “even if you yourself had the smallest of parts in it. This morning’s news was the 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, just 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 neatly trimmed mustache. “Any number of explanations. Do you know the epitaph Andrew Marvell wrote for a lady?
“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 Ehrengraf Riposte
Martin Ehrengraf placed his hands on the top of his exceedingly cluttered desk and looked across its top. 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 particular shade of blue that Ehrengraf would never have chosen for himself, was well tailored and expensive. It was logical to assume that the man within the suit was abundantly supplied with money, an assumption the little lawyer liked to be able to make about all his prospective clients.
Now he said, “Won’t you take a seat, Mr. Crowe? You’ll be more comfortable.”
“I’d rather stand,” Ethan Crowe said. “I’m too much on edge to sit still.”
“Hmmm. There’s something I’ve learned in my practice, Mr. Crowe, and that’s the great advantage in acting as if. When I’m to defend a client who gives every indication of guilt, I act as if he were indeed innocent. And you know, Mr. Crowe, it’s astonishing how often the client does in fact prove to be innocent, often to his own surprise.”