Lawrence Block - The Ehrengraf Fandango

“Patricia Munk.”

“Another person I’d never heard of until I killed her with a single shot to the head. She lived across the street from the Kuhldreyers, and I don’t know what she was doing at their house that afternoon.”

Keeping an appointment in Samarra, Ehrengraf supposed.

“Before the event,” he said, “the last thing you remember is getting in your car.”

“Yes.”

“And then the next thing you recall—”

“Is standing in their living room with a gun in my hand.”

“A gun which you’d already fired.”

“Yes, although I have no recollection of firing it.”

“And the people in the room—”

“Are lying there dead. I’m seeing them for the first time, and they’re dead, because I’ve killed them.”

“By pointing the gun in your hand and pulling the trigger, but you don’t remember so doing.”

“No, but who else could have done it? I was all alone in the room. Except for three people who could hardly have done it, because they were all dead.”

Ehrengraf thought it over, and made a little tent of his fingers. Or might it better be a church? He extended both index fingers, interlaced the others. Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the doors and see all the people—

“Lunch,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You had lunch,” he said. “At the Hour Glass, with a friend.”

“Yes.”

“What did you have to eat?”

“What did I have to eat? Why on earth is that important?”

“What might be important,” he said, “is your recollection of it.”

“Fish,” she said. “Filet of sole almandine. With a green salad. I had the house dressing on the salad.”

“And your companion,” Ehrengraf said.

“I don’t remember what she had. Maybe if I concentrate—”

“I don’t care what she had. Tell me about her.”

“Hypnotized,” Cheryl Plumley said.

Ehrengraf marked his place in a book of Swinburne’s verse and regarded his client, who sat in the red leather chair to the side of his chronically untidy desk. At their initial meeting the little lawyer had sensed the beauty damped down by imprisonment. Now, her anxiety dispelled with the restoration of her freedom, the woman positively glowed.

“Barring Satanic intervention,” Ehrengraf said, “no other explanation came to mind. You had acted in an uncharacteristic manner, taking the lives of a man and two women, for no discernible reason, and with no recollection of having done so. What more obvious explanation than that you had been hypnotized?”

“By Maureen McClintock.”

“The woman with whom you’d lunched at the Hour Glass. Not a close friend, merely a casual acquaintance — and yet after an hour in her company, you’d returned abruptly to consciousness in a strange house with a smoking gun in your hand.”

“I thought I must have fired it. And killed those people.”

“A natural conclusion, to be sure. There you were, after all, gun in hand. And there they were, shot dead. Hypnosis, as I understand it, can’t lead one to commit an act against one’s nature. I could not hypnotize you and compel you to beat your infant son to death with a tire iron.”

“I don’t have a son.”

“Or a tire iron, Ms. Plumley, but that’s neither here nor there. Supposing you had both, hypnosis would not lead you to use one upon the other. But if you were encouraged to believe that the tire iron was in fact a fly swatter, and the child a pesky mosquito—”

“Oh. And that’s what happened in the house on Woodbridge Avenue?”

Ehrengraf shook his head. “Not at all,” he said. “They never gave you a paraffin test.”

“A paraffin test?”

“To detect nitrate particles on your skin, a natural consequence of firing a gun. It’s routinely performed in such cases, when someone is suspected of firing a gun, but they didn’t bother in your case because it seemed superfluous. There you were with the gun in your hand, and they assumed you’d fired it, and you didn’t deny it.”

“Because I didn’t remember.” She brightened. “But if they didn’t do the test, that meant I didn’t fire the gun!”

It meant no such thing, Ehrengraf knew, but he let it go.

“If you didn’t,” he said, “then someone else did. And even if you had in fact gunned those people down, you could only have done so under the impression that they were flies and the handgun was a fly swatter.”

“How could I think—”

“Oh, not literally,” he said, and fingered the knot in his tie. It was his Caedmon Society necktie, his usual choice for moments of triumph, and was this not a triumphant occasion? Had he not once again snatched an innocent client from the jaws of what the media persistently called the criminal justice system?

“But—”

“Perhaps the suggestion implanted under hypnosis was that you were playing a violent video game, and that Patricia Munk and the Kuhldreyers were images on an Xbox screen; by zapping them with your ray gun, you’d advance to the next level of the game.”

“I’ve never played a video game.”

“Nor did you play this one,” Ehrengraf said smoothly, “because in fact you didn’t shoot anyone. It was Maureen McClintock who did the shooting, then pressed the gun into your hand and slipped out the door. Perhaps she told you that you’d wake up when you heard a doorbell, and rang it just before getting into her car and driving away. You heard it, you returned to full consciousness, and what else were you to believe but that you’d caused the mayhem before you?”

“So you were right, Mr. Ehrengraf. I really was innocent. But the police—”

“Did everything one might have hoped for, once they were steered in the right direction. They’d never had reason to take a good look at Maureen McClintock, whose connection to the matter seemed limited to her having shared a table with you earlier. But once they did, they found no end of evidence to implicate her and exonerate you.”

“She’d studied hypnotism.”

“She owned over a dozen books on the subject,” he said, “all of them well-thumbed, along with a fifteen-lesson correspondence course. And they weren’t out on display where anyone might have noticed them. They were tucked away out of sight, as if she didn’t want anyone to know of her interest in the subject.”

“Which she denied, according to the papers.”

“Stoutly,” said Ehrengraf. “Maintained she’d never seen them before in her life.”

“Then how did she explain them?”

“She couldn’t. She also maintained she’d never had any contact with the Kuhldreyers, or with Patricia Munk. And yet there was a newspaper clipping, news of a promotion Mr. Kuhldreyer had received. And a photograph of the couple, and a rather startling letter from Patricia Munk.”

“I read as much in the paper. But they didn’t go into detail.”

“They couldn’t,” Ehrengraf said. “It was quite graphic in nature. Evidently Munk and McClintock had had an affair, and Munk wrote about it at some length, and in some detail. You couldn’t reproduce it in a family newspaper.”

“I didn’t know Maureen well,” Cheryl Plumley said, “but I had no idea she was gay.”

“Something else she denies, but her denial is severely compromised, not only by Munk’s letter to her but by several letters she seems to have written to Munk, found in a hat box in the dead woman’s closet. Of course she swears she never wrote those letters. Oh, it’s a sad case indeed, Ms. Plumley. What did she have against the Kuhldreyers? Was it some sort of love triangle, or quadrangle? And why choose you as a cat’s-paw for her adventure in triple homicide?”

“So many questions, Mr. Ehrengraf, and I can’t answer any of them. But I’ll have to, won’t I?”