Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Money?” Gort grinned. “Ginnie didn’t have a dime. I was her legal heir just as she was mine, but I was the one who had the money. All she left was the jewelry and clothing that my money paid for.”

“Any insurance?”

“Exactly enough to pay your fee,” Gort said, and grinned this time rather like a shark. “Except that I won’t see a penny of it. Fifty thousand dollars, double indemnity for accidental death, and I think the insurance companies call murder an accident, although it’s always struck me as rather purposeful. That makes one hundred thousand dollars, your fee to the penny, but none of it’ll come my way.”

“It’s true that one cannot profit financially from a crime,” Ehrengraf said. “But if you’re found innocent—”

Gort shook his head. “Doesn’t make any difference,” he said. “I just learned this the other day. About the same time I was buying the dynamite, she was changing her beneficiary. The change went through in plenty of time. The whole hundred thousand goes to that rotter Lattimore.”

“Now that,” said Martin Ehrengraf, “is very interesting.”

Two weeks andthree days later Alvin Gort sat in a surprisingly comfortable straight-backed chair in Martin Ehrengraf’s exceptionally cluttered office. He balanced a checkbook on his knee and carefully made out a check. The fountain pen he used had cost him $65. The lawyer’s services, for which the check he was writing represented payment in full, had cost him considerably more, yet Gort, a good judge of value, thought Ehrengraf’s fee a bargain and the pen overpriced.

“One hundred thousand dollars,” he said, waving the check in the air to dry its ink. “I’ve put today’s date on it but I’ll ask you to hold it until Monday morning before depositing it. I’ve instructed my broker to sell securities and transfer funds to my checking account. I don’t normally maintain a balance sufficient to cover a check of this size.”

“That’s understandable.”

“I’m glad something is. Because I’m damned if I can understand how you got me off the hook.”

Ehrengraf allowed himself a smile. “My greatest obstacle was your own mental attitude,” he said. “You honestly believed yourself to be guilty of your wife’s death, didn’t you?”

“But—”

“Ah, my dear Mr. Gort. You see, I knew you were innocent. The Ehrengraf Presumption assured me of that. I merely had to look for someone with the right sort of motive, and who should emerge but Mr. Barry Lattimore, your wife’s lover and beneficiary, a man with a need for money and a man whose affair with your wife was reaching crisis proportions.

“It was clear to me that you were not the sort of man to commit murder in such an obvious fashion. Buying the dynamite openly, signing the purchase order with your own name — my dear Mr. Gort, you would never behave so foolishly! No, you had to have been framed, and clearly Lattimore was the man who had reason to frame you.”

“And then they found things,” Gort said.

“Indeed they did, once I was able to tell them where to look. Extraordinary what turned up! You would think Lattimore would have had the sense to get rid of all that, wouldn’t you? But no, a burgundy blazer and a pair of white slacks, a costume identical to your own but tailored to Mr. Lattimore’s frame, hung in the very back of his clothes closet. And in a drawer of his desk the police found half a dozen sheets of paper on which he’d practiced your signature until he was able to do quite a creditable job of writing it. By dressing like you and signing your name to the purchase order, he quite neatly put your neck in the noose.”

“Incredible.”

“He even copied your tasseled loafers. The police found a pair in his closet, and of course the man never habitually wore loafers of any sort. Of course he denied ever having seen the shoes before. Or the jacket, or the slacks, and of course he denied having practiced your signature.”

Gort’s eyes went involuntarily to Ehrengraf’s own shoes. This time the lawyer was wearing black wing tips. His suit was dove gray and somewhat more sedately tailored than the brown one Gort had seen previously. His tie was maroon, his cuff links simple gold hexagons. The precision of Ehrengraf’s dress and carriage contrasted sharply with the disarray of his office.

“And that letter from your wife to her sister Grace,” Ehrengraf continued. “It turned out to be authentic, as it happens, but it also proved to be open to a second interpretation. The man of whom Virginia was afraid was never named, and a thoughtful reading showed he could as easily have been Lattimore as you. And then of course a second letter to Grace was found among your wife’s effects. She evidently wrote it the night before her death and never had a chance to mail it. It’s positively damning. She tells her sister how she changed the beneficiary of her insurance at Lattimore’s insistence, how your knowledge of the affair was making Lattimore irrational and dangerous, and how she couldn’t avoid the feeling that he planned to kill her. She goes on to say that she intended to change her insurance again, making Grace the beneficiary, and that she would so inform Lattimore in order to remove any financial motive for her murder.

“But even as she was writing those lines, he was preparing to put the dynamite in her car.”

Ehrengraf went on explaining and Gort could only stare at him in wonder. Was it possible that his own memory could have departed so utterly from reality? Had the twin shocks of Ginnie’s death and of arrest have caused him to fabricate a whole set of false memories?

Damn it, he remembered buying that dynamite! He remembered wiring it under the hood of her Pontiac! So how on earth—

The Ehrengraf Presumption, he thought. If Ehrengraf could presume Gort’s innocence the way he did, why couldn’t Gort presume his own innocence? Why not give himself the benefit of the doubt?

Because the alternative was terrifying. The letter, the practice sheets of his signature, the shoes and slacks and burgundy blazer—

“Mr. Gort? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Gort said.

“You looked pale for a moment. The strain, no doubt. Will you take a glass of water?”

“No, I don’t think so.” Gort lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply. “I’m fine,” he said. “I feel good about everything. You know, not only am I in the clear but ultimately I don’t think your fee will cost me anything.”

“Oh?”

“Not if that rotter killed her. Lattimore can’t profit from a murder he committed. And while she may have intended to make Grace her beneficiary, her unfulfilled intent has no legal weight. So her estate becomes the beneficiary of the insurance policy, and she never did get around to changing her will, so that means the money will wind up in my hands. Amazing, isn’t it?”

“Amazing.” The little lawyer rubbed his hands together briskly. “But you do know what they say about unhatched chickens, Mr. Gort. Mr. Lattimore hasn’t been convicted of anything yet.”

“You think he’s got a chance of getting off?”

“That would depend,” said Martin Ehrengraf, “on his choice of attorney.”

This time Ehrengraf’ssuit was navy blue with a barely perceptible stripe in a lighter blue. His shirt, as usual, was white. His shoes were black loafers — no tassels or braid — and his tie had a half-inch stripe of royal blue flanked by two narrower stripes, one of gold and the other of a rather bright green, all on a navy field. The necktie was that of the Caedmon Society of Oxford University, an organization of which Mr. Ehrengraf was not a member. The tie was a souvenir of another case and the lawyer wore it now and then on especially auspicious occasions.