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

dandy, Beale thought, but from what he’d heard the man had the skills to carry it off. He wasn’t all front. He was said to get results.
    “
Your
innocence,” Ehrengraf said again. “Your innocence is not merely the innocence that is the opposite of guilt. It is the innocence that is the opposite of experience. Do you know Blake, Mr. Beale?”
    “Blake?”
    “William Blake, the poet. You wouldn’t know him personally, of course. He’s been dead for over a century. He wrote two books of poems early in his career,
Songs of Innocence
and
Songs of Experience
. Each poem in the one book had a counterpart in the other.
    “Tyger, tyger, burning bright,
    In the forests of the night,
    What immortal hand or eye,
    Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
    “Perhaps that poem is familiar to you, Mr. Beale.”
    “I think I studied it in school.”
    “It’s not unlikely. Well, you don’t need a poetry lesson from me, sir, not in these depressing surroundings. Let me move a little more directly to the point. Innocence versus experience, Mr. Beale. You found yourself accused of a murder, sir, and you knew only that you had not committed it. And, being innocent not only of the murder itself but in Blake’s sense of the word, you simply engaged a competent attorney and assumed matters would work themselves out in short order. We live in an enlightened democracy, Mr. Beale, and we grow up knowing that courts exist to free the innocent and the guilty, that no one gets away with murder.”
    “And that’s all nonsense, eh?” Grantham Beale smiled his second smile since hearing the jury’s verdict. If nothing else, he thought, the spiffy little lawyer improved a man’s spirits.
    “I wouldn’t call it nonsense,” Ehrengraf said. “But after all is said and done, you’re in prison and the real murderer is not.”
    “Walker Murchison.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “The real murderer,” Grantham Beale said. “I’m in prison and Walker Gladstone Murchison is free.”
    “Precisely. Because it is not enough to be guiltless, Mr. Beale. One must also be able to convince a jury of one’s guiltlessness. In short, had you been less innocent and more experienced, you could have taken steps early on to assure you would not find yourself in your present condition right now.”
    “And what could I have done?”
    “What you
have
done, at long last,” said Martin Ehrengraf. “You could have called me immediately.”
     
    “A lbert Speldron,” Ehrengraf said. “The murder victim, shot three times in the heart at close range. The murder weapon was an unregistered handgun, a thirty-eight-caliber revolver. It was subsequently located in the spare tire well of your automobile.”
    “It wasn’t my gun. I never saw it in my life until the police showed it to me.”
    “Of course you didn’t,” Ehrengraf said soothingly. “To continue. Albert Speldron was a loan shark. Not, however, the sort of gruff-voiced thug who lends ten or twenty dollars at a time to longshoremen and factory hands and breaks their legs with a baseball bat if they’re late paying the vig.”
    “Paying the what?”
    “Ah, sweet innocence,” Ehrengraf said. “The vig. Short for vigorish. It’s a term used by the criminal element to describe the ongoing interest payments which a debtor must make to maintain his status.”
    “I never heard the term,” Beale said, “but I paid it well enough. I paid Speldron a thousand dollars a week and that didn’t touch the principal.”
    “And you had borrowed how much?”
    “Fifty thousand dollars.”
    “The jury apparently considered that a satisfactory motive for murder.”
    “Well, that’s crazy,” said. “Why on earth would I want to kill Speldron? I didn’t hate the man. He’d done me a service by lending me that money. I had a chance to buy a valuable stamp collection. That’s my business, I buy and sell stamps, and I had an opportunity to get hold of an extraordinary collection, mostly U.S. and British