Defender of the Innocent: The Casebook of Martin Ehrengraf by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online

planted it in my car. Then he’d made up a story about my having had a fight with Albert Speldron, and of course that got the police looking in my direction, and the next thing I knew I was in jail. I saw the letter Murchison wrote. The police let me look at it. He went into complete detail.”
    “Considerate of him.”
    “And then he did the usual thing. Gave the letter to a lawyer with instructions that it be kept in his safe and opened only in the event of his death.” Beale found a pair of stamp tongs in the clutter atop his desk, used them to lift a stamp, frowned at it for a moment, then set it down and looked directly at Martin Ehrengraf. “Do you suppose he had a premonition? For God’s sake, Murchison was a young man, his health was good, and why should he anticipate dying? Maybe he did have a premonition.”
    “I doubt it.”
    “Then it’s certainly a remarkable coincidence. A matter of weeks after turning this letter over to a lawyer, Murchison lost control of his car on a curve. Smashed right through the guard rail, plunged a couple of hundred feet, exploded on impact. I don’t suppose the man knew what had happened to him.”
    “I suspect you’re right.”
    “He was always a safe driver,” Beale mused. “Perhaps he’d been drinking.”
    “Perhaps.”
    “And if he hadn’t been decent enough to write that letter, I might be spending the rest of my life behind bars.”
    “How fortunate for you things turned out as they did.”
    “Exactly,” Beale said. “And so, although I truly appreciate what you’ve done on my behalf, whatever that may be, and although I don’t doubt you could have secured my liberty in due course, although I’m sure I don’t know how you might have managed it, nevertheless as far as your fee is concerned—”
    “Mr. Beale.”
    “Yes?”
    “Do you really believe that a detestable troll like W.G. Murchison would take pains to arrange for your liberty in the event of his death?”
    “Well, perhaps I misjudged the man. Perhaps—”
    “Murchison hated you, Mr. Beale. If he found he was dying his one source of satisfaction would have been the knowledge that you were in prison for a crime you hadn’t committed. I told you that you were an innocent, Mr. Beale, and a few weeks in prison has not dented or dulled your innocence. You actually think Murchison wrote that note.”
    ‘You mean he didn’t?”
    “It was typed upon a machine in his office,” the lawyer said. “His own stationery was used, and the signature at the bottom is one many an expert would swear is Murchison’s own.”
    “But he didn’t write it?”
    “Of course not.” Martin Ehrengraf’s hands hovered in the air before him. They might have been poised over an invisible typewriter or they might merely be looming as the talons of a bird of prey.
    Grantham Beale stared at the little lawyer’s hands in fascination. “You typed that letter,” he said.
    Ehrengraf shrugged.
    “You—but Murchison left it with a lawyer!”
    “The lawyer was not one Murchison had used in the past. Murchison evidently selected a stranger from the Yellow Pages, as far as one can determine, and made contact with him over the telephone, explaining what he wanted the man to do for him. He then mailed the letter along with a postal money order to cover the attorney’s fee and a covering note confirming the telephone conversation. It seems he did not use his own name in his discussions with his lawyer, and he signed an alias to his covering note and to the money order as well. The signature he wrote, though, does seem to be in his own handwriting.”
    Ehrengraf paused, and his right hand went to finger the knot of his necktie. This particular tie, rather more colorful than his usual choice, was that of the Caedmon Society of Oxford University, an organization to which Martin Ehrengraf did not belong. The tie was a souvenir of an earlier case and he tended to wear it on particularly happy occasions, moments of personal