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

suspected, Mr. Protter.”
    “It’s the craziest thing I ever heard of. Let me see if I got the drift of it straight. My Gretchen was carrying on with Gates after all. I thought it was just a way to get in a dig at her, accusing her of carrying on with him, but actually it was happening all the time.”
    “So it would seem.”
    “And that’s why she got so steamed when I brought it up.” Protter nodded, wrapped up in thought. “Anyway, Gates also had something going with Agnes Mullane. You know something, Mr. Ehrengraf? He musta been nuts. Why would anybody who was getting next to Agnes want to bother with Gretchen?”
    “Artists perceive the world differently from the rest of us, Mr. Protter.”
    “If that’s a polite way of saying he was cockeyed, I sure gotta go with you on that. So here he’s getting it on with the both of them, and Agnes finds out and she’s jealous. How do you figure she found out?”
    “It’s always possible Gates told her,” Ehrengraf suggested. “Or perhaps she heard you accusing your wife of infidelity. You and Gretchen had both been drinking, and your argument may have been a loud one.”
    “Could be. A few boilermakers and I tend to raise my voice.”
    “Most people do. Or perhaps Miss Mullane saw some of Gates’s sketches of your wife. I understand there were several found in his apartment. He may have been an abstract expressionist, but he seems to have been capable of realistic sketches of nudes. Of course he’s denied they were his work, but he’d be likely to say that, wouldn’t he?”
    “I guess so,” Protter said. “Naked pictures of Gretchen, gee, you never know, do you?”
    “You never do,” Ehrengraf agreed. “In any event, Miss Mullane had a key to your apartment. One was found among her effects. Perhaps it was Gates’s key, perhaps Gretchen had given it to him and Agnes Mullane stole it. She let herself into your apartment, found you and your wife unconscious, and pounded your wife on the head with an empty beer bottle. Your wife was alive when Miss Mullane entered your apartment, Mr. Protter, and dead when she left it.”
    “So I didn’t kill her after all.”
    “Indeed you did not.” Ehrengraf smiled for a moment. Then his face turned grave. “Agnes Mullane was not cut out for murder,” he said. “At heart she was a gentle soul. I realized that at once when I spoke with her.”
    “You went and talked to Agnes?”
    The little lawyer nodded. “I suspect my interview with her may have driven her over the edge,” he said. “Perhaps she sensed that I was suspicious of her. She wrote out a letter to the police, detailing what she had done. Then she must have gone upstairs to Mr. Gates’s apartment, because she managed to secure a twenty-five caliber automatic pistol registered to him. She returned to her own apartment, put the weapon to her chest, and shot herself in the heart.”
    “She had some chest, too.”
    Ehrengraf did not comment.
    “I’ll tell you,” Protter said, “the whole thing’s a little too complicated for a simple guy like me to take it all in all at once. I can see why it was open and shut as far as the cops were concerned. There’s me and the wife drinking, and there’s me and the wife fighting, and the next thing you know she’s dead and I’m sleeping it off. If it wasn’t for you, I’d be doing time for killing her.”
    “I played a part,” Ehrengraf said modestly. “But it’s Agnes Mullane’s conscience that saved you from prison.”
    “Poor Agnes.”
    “A tortured, tormented woman, Mr. Protter.”
    “I don’t know about that,” Protter said. “But she had some body on her, I’ll say that for her.” He drew a breath. “What about you, Mr. Ehrengraf? You did a real job for me. I wish I could pay you.”
    “Don’t worry about it.”
    “I guess the court pays you something, huh?”
    “There’s a set fee of a hundred and seventy-five dollars,” Ehrengraf said, “but I don’t know that I’m eligible