Ehrengraf for the Defense Read Online Free PDF Page B

quite elegant. Almost a 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,” 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.”
    * * *
    “Albert 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,