Defender of the Innocent: The Casebook of Martin Ehrengraf Read Online Free PDF

emotionally involved with anyone else? Did she have another lover? Had she had any other lovers before you came into the picture? And how about Mr. Gort? A former mistress who might have had a grudge against both him and his wife? Hmmm?” Ehrengraf smoothed the ends of his mustache. “Or perhaps, just perhaps, there was an elaborate plot hatched by
Mrs
. Gort.”
    “Ginnie?”
    “It’s not impossible. I’m afraid I must reject the possibility of suicide. It’s tempting but in this instance I fear it just won’t wash. But let’s suppose, let’s merely suppose, that Mrs. Gort decided to murder her husband and implicate you.”
    “Why would she do that?”
    “I’ve no idea. But suppose she did, and suppose she intended to get her husband to drive her car and arranged the dynamite accordingly, and then when she left the house so hurriedly she forgot what she’d done, and of course the moment she turned the key in the ignition it all came back to her in a rather dramatic way.”
    “But I can’t believe—”
    “Oh, Mr. Lattimore,” Ehrengraf said gently, “we believe what it pleases us to believe, don’t you agree? The important thing is to recognize that you are innocent and to act on that recognition.”
    “But how can you be absolutely certain of my innocence?”
    Martin Ehrengraf permitted himself a smile. “Mr. Lattimore,” he said, “let me tell you about a principle of mine. I call it the Ehrengraf Presumption.”
     

 
    THE E HRENGRAF
    Experience
----
    “He who doubts from what he sees
    Will ne’er believe, do what you please.
    If the Sun and Moon should doubt,
    They’d immediately go out.”
    —William Blake
     
    “I nnocence,” said Martin Ehrengraf. “There’s the problem in a nutshell.”
    “Innocence is a problem?”
    The little lawyer glanced around the prison cell, then turned to regard his client. “Precisely,” he said. “If you weren’t innocent you wouldn’t be here.”
    “Oh, really?” Grantham Beale smiled, and while it was worthy of inclusion in a toothpaste commercial, it was the first smile he’d managed since his conviction on first-degree murder charges just two weeks and four days earlier. “Then you’re saying that innocent men go to prison while guilty men walk free. Is that what you’re saying?”
    “It happens that way more than you might care to believe,” Ehrengraf said softly. “But no, it is not what I am saying.”
    “Oh?”
    “I am not contrasting innocence and guilt, Mr. Beale. I know you are innocent of murder. That is almost beside the point. All clients of Martin Ehrengraf are innocent of the crimes with which they are charged, and this innocence always emerges in due course. Indeed, this is more than a presumption on my part. It is the manner in which I make my living. I set high fees, Mr. Beale, but I collect them only when my innocent clients emerge with their innocence a matter of public record. If my client goes to prison I collect nothing whatsoever, not even whatever expenses I incur on his behalf. So my clients are always innocent, Mr. Beale, just as you are innocent, in the sense that they are not guilty.”
    “Then why is my innocence a problem?”
    “Ah,
your
innocence.” Martin Ehrengraf smoothed the ends of his neatly trimmed mustache. His thin lips drew back in a smile, but the smile did not reach his deeply set dark eyes. He was, Grantham Beale noted, a superbly well-dressed little man, almost a dandy. He wore a Dartmouth green blazer with pearl buttons over a cream shirt with a tab collar. His slacks were flannel, modishly cuffed and pleated and the identical color of the shirt. His silk tie was a darker green than his jacket and sported a design in silver and bronze thread below the knot, a lion battling a unicorn. His cuff links matched his pearl blazer buttons. On his aristocratically small feet he wore highly polished seamless cordovan loafers, unadorned with tassels or braid, quite simple and quite elegant. Almost a