“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 Mayhew 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 Mayhew. “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 tomorrow. 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 navy 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 how 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 I don’t 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 by an appropriate riposte.
But how was one to deal with a nasty madman? A helpless, pathetic madman?
Ehrengraf, who was fond of poetry, sought his memory for an illuminating phrase. Thoughts of madmen recalled Christopher Smart, an eighteenth-century Londoner who was periodically confined to Bedlam where he wrote a long poem that was largely comprehensible only to himself and God.