Lawrence Block: Ehrengraf Settlement

“For perhaps a thousand dollars a man, he’d made it impossible for you to secure representation.” Ehrengraf frowned. “He did all this after discovering about you and young Bogue?”

“He began these consultations when we returned from our honeymoon.”

“Had your discontent already become evident?”

“Not even to me, Martin. Millard was simply taking precautions.” She finished her Drambuie, set down the empty glass. “And I did find a lawyer, a young man with a general practice, who took a look at the agreement I’d signed. He kept telling me it wasn’t his area of expertise. But he said it looked rock-solid to him.”

“Ah,” said Ehrengraf. “Well, we’ll have to see about that, won’t we?”

It was three weeks and a day later when Ehrengraf emerged from his morning shower and toweled himself dry. He shaved, and spent a moment or two trimming a few errant hairs from his beard, a Van Dyke that came to a precise point.

Beards had come and go in Ehrengraf’s life, and upon his chin, and he felt this latest incarnation was the most successful to date. There was just the least hint of gray in it, even as there was the slightest touch of gray at his temples.

He hoped it would stay that way, at least for a while. With gray, as with so many things, a little was an asset, a lot a liability. Nor could one successfully command time to stand still, anymore than King Canute could order a cessation of the tidal flow. There would be more gray, and the day would come when he would either accept it (and, by implication, all the slings and arrows of the aging process) or reach for the bottle of hair coloring.

Neither prospect was appealing. But both were off in the future, and did not bear thinking about. Certainly not on what was to be a day of triumph, a triumph all the sweeter for having been delayed.

He took his time dressing, choosing his newest suit, a three-piece navy pinstripe from Peller & Mure. He considered several shirts and settled on a spread-collar broadcloth in French blue, not least of all for the way it would complement his tie.

And the choice of tie was foreordained. It was, of course, that of the Caedmon Society.

The spread collar called for a Double Windsor, and Ehrengraf’s fingers were equal to the task. He slipped his feet into black monk-strap loafers, then considered the suit’s third piece, the vest. The only argument against it was that it would conceal much of his tie, but the tie and its significance were important only to the wearer.

He decided to go with the vest.

And now? It was getting on for nine, and his appointment was at his office, at half-past ten. He’d had his light breakfast, and the day was clear and bright and neither too warm nor too cold. He could walk to his office, taking his time, stopping along the way for a cup of coffee.

But why not wait and see if the phone might chance to ring?

And it did, just after nine o’clock. Ehrengraf smiled when it rang, and his smile broadened at the sound of the caller’s voice, and broadened further as he listened. “Yes, of course,” he said. “I’d like that.”

“When we spoke yesterday,” Alicia Ravenstock said, “I automatically suggested a meeting at your office. Because I’d been uncomfortable going there before, and now the reason for that discomfort had been removed.”

“So you wanted to exercise your new freedom.”

“Then I remembered what a nice apartment you have, and what good coffee I enjoyed on my previous visit.”

“When you called,” Ehrengraf said, “the first thing I did was make a fresh pot.”

He fetched a cup for each of them, and watched her purse her lips and take a first sip.

“Just right,” she said. “There’s so much to talk about, Martin, but I’d like to get the business part out of the way.”

She drew an envelope from her purse, and Ehrengraf held his breath, at least metaphorically, while he opened it. This was the second time he’d received an envelope from someone with Ravenstock for a surname, and the first time had proved profoundly disappointing.

Still, she’d used his first name, and moved their meeting from his office to his residence. Those ought to be favorable omens.

The check, he saw at a glance, had the correct number of zeroes. His eyes widened when he took a second look at it.

“This is higher than the sum we agreed on,” he said.

“By ten percent. I’ve suddenly become a wealthy woman, Martin, and I felt a bonus was in order. I hope you don’t regard it as an insult—”

Money? An insult? He assured her that it was nothing of the sort.

“It’s really quite remarkable,” she said. “Millard is in jail, where he’s being held without bail. I’ve filed suit for divorce, and my attorney assures me that the pre-nup is essentially null and void. Martin, I knew the evidence against Bo was bogus. But I had no idea it would all come to light as it has.”

“It was an interesting chain of events,” he agreed.

“It was a tissue of lies,” she said, “and it started to unravel when someone called Channel Seven’s investigative reporter, pointing out that Bo was at a hockey game when the Milf Murder took place. How could he be in two places at the same time?”

“How indeed?”

“And then there was the damning physical evidence, the lacrosse shirt with Bo’s DNA. They found a receipt among the boy’s effects for a bag of clothes donated to Goodwill Industries, and among the several items mentioned was one Nichols School lacrosse jersey. How Millard knew about the donation and got his hands on the shirt—”

“We may never know, Alicia. And it may not have been Millard himself who found the shirt.”

“It was probably Bainbridge. But we won’t know that, either, now that he’s dead.”

“Suicide is a terrible thing,” Ehrengraf said. “And sometimes it seems to ask as many questions as it answers. Though this particular act did answer quite a few.”

“Walter Bainbridge was Millard’s closest friend in the police department, and I thought it was awfully convenient the way he came up with all the evidence against Bo. But I guess Channel Seven’s investigation convinced him he’d gone too far, and when the truth about the lacrosse shirt came to light, he could see the walls closing in. How desperate he must have been to put his service revolver in his mouth and blow his brains out.”

“It was more than the evidence he faked. The note he left suggests he himself may have committed the Milf Murder. You see, it’s almost certain he committed a similar rape and murder in Kenmore just days before he took his own life.”

“The nurse,” she remembered. “There was no physical evidence at the crime scene, but his note alluded to ‘other bad things I’ve done,’ and didn’t they find something of hers in Bainbridge’s desk at police headquarters?”

“A pair of soiled panties.”

“The pervert. So he had ample reason to pin the Milf Murder on Bo. To help Millard, and to divert any possible suspicion from himself. This really is superb coffee.”

“May I bring you a fresh cup?”

“Not quite yet, Martin. Those notebooks of Bo’s, with the crude drawings and the fantasies? They seemed so unlikely to me, so much at variance with the Tegrum Bogue I knew, and well they might have done.”

“They’ve turned out to be forgeries.”

“Rather skillful forgeries,” she said, “but forgeries all the same. Bainbridge had imitated Bo’s handwriting, and he’d left behind a notebook in which he’d written out drafts of the material in his own hand, then practiced copying them in Bo’s. And do you know what else they found?”

“Something of your husband’s, I believe.”

“Millard supplied those fantasies for Bainbridge. He wrote them out in his own cramped hand, and gave them to Bainbridge to save his policeman friend the necessity of using his imagination. But before he did this he made photocopies, which he kept. They turned up in a strongbox in his closet, and they were a perfect match for the originals that had been among Bainbridge’s effects.”