Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Well, I’m sure it’s a worthwhile organization,” Crowe said, “but the point is I’m not interested in wild mustangs and burros, or even tame ones, but Mayhew made me a member and pledged a hundred dollars on my behalf, or maybe it was a thousand dollars, I can’t remember.”

“The exact amount isn’t important at the moment, Mr. Crowe.”

“He’s driving me crazy!”

“So it would seem. But to kill a man because of some practical jokes—”

“There’s no end to them. He started doing this almost two years ago. At first it was completely maddening because I had no idea what was happening or who was doing this to me. From time to time he’ll slack off and I’ll think he’s had his fun and has decided to leave me alone. Then he’ll start up again.”

“Have you spoken to him?”

“I can’t. He laughs like the lunatic he is and hangs up on me.”

“Have you confronted him?”

“I can’t. He lives in an apartment downtown on Chippewa Street. He doesn’t let visitors in and never seems to leave the place.”

“And you’ve tried the police?”

“They can’t seem to do anything. He just lies to them, denies all responsibility, tells them it must be someone else. A very nice policeman told me the only sensible thing I can do is wait him out. He’ll get tired, he assured me, the man’s madness will run its course. He’ll decide he’s had his revenge.”

“And you tried to do that?”

“For a while. When it didn’t work, I engaged a private detective. He obtained evidence of Mayhew’s activities, evidence that will stand up in court. But my attorney convinced me not to press charges.”

“Why, for heaven’s sake?”

“The man’s a cripple.”

“Your attorney?”

“Certainly not. Mayhew’s a cripple, he’s confined to a wheelchair. I suppose that’s why he never leaves his squalid little apartment. But my attorney said I could only charge him with malicious mischief, which is not the most serious crime in the book and which sounds rather less serious than it is because it has the connotation of a child’s impish prank—”

“Yes.”

“—and there we’d be in court, myself a large man in good physical condition and Mayhew a sniveling cripple in a wheelchair, and he’d get everyone’s sympathy and undoubtedly be exonerated of all charges while I’d come off as a bully and a laughingstock. I couldn’t make charges stand up in criminal court, and if I sued him I’d probably lose. And even if I won that, what could I get? The man doesn’t have anything to start with.”

Ehrengraf nodded thoughtfully. “He blames you for crippling him?”

“I don’t know. I had never even heard of him before he started tormenting me, but who knows what a madman might think? He doesn’t seem to want anything from me. I’ve called him up, asked him what he wanted, and he only laughs and hangs up on me.”

“And so you’ve decided to kill him.”

“I haven’t said that.”

Ehrengraf sighed. “We’re not in court, Mr. Crowe, so that sort of technicality’s not important between us. You’ve implied you intend to kill him.”

“Perhaps.”

“At any rate, that’s the inference I’ve drawn. I can certainly understand your feelings, but isn’t the remedy you propose an extreme one? The cure seems worse than the disease. To expose yourself to a murder trial—”

“But your clients rarely go to trial.”

“Oh?”

Crowe hazarded a smile. It looked out of place on his large red face, and after a moment it withdrew. “I’m familiar with your methods, Mr. Ehrengraf,” he said. “Your clients rarely go to trial. You hardly ever show up in a courtroom. You take a case and then something curious happens. The evidence changes, or new evidence is discovered, or someone else confesses, or the murder turns out to be an accident, after all, or — well, something always happens.”

“Truth will out,” Ehrengraf said.

“Truth or fiction, something happens. Now here I am, plagued by a maniac, and I’ve engaged you to undertake my defense whenever it should become necessary, and it seems to me that by so doing I may bring things to the point where it won’t become necessary.”

Ehrengraf looked at him. A man who would select a suit of that particular shade, he thought, was either color blind or capable of anything.

“Of course I don’t know what might happen,” Ethan Crowe went on. “Just as hypothesis, Terence Mayhew might die. Of course, if that happened I wouldn’t have any reason to murder him, and so I wouldn’t come to trial. But that’s just an example. It’s certainly not my business to tell you your business, is it?”

“Certainly not,” said Martin Ehrengraf.

While Terence ReginaldMayhew’s four-room apartment on Chippewa Street was scarcely luxurious, it was by no means the squalid pesthole Ehrengraf had been led to expect. The block, to be sure, was not far removed from slum status. The building itself had certainly seen better days. But the Mayhew apartment itself, occupying the fourth-floor front and looking northward over a group of two-story frame houses, was cozy and comfortable.

The little lawyer followed Mayhew’s wheelchair down a short hallway and into a book-lined study. A log of wax and compressed sawdust burned in the fireplace. A clock ticked on the mantel. Mayhew turned his wheelchair around, eyed his visitor from head to toe, and made a brisk clucking sound with his tongue. “So you’re his lawyer,” he said. “Not the poor boob who called me a couple of months ago, though. That one kept coming up with threats and I couldn’t help laughing at him. He must have turned purple. When you laugh in a man’s face after he’s made legal threats, he generally turns purple. That’s been my experience. What’s your name again?”

“Ehrengraf. Martin H. Ehrengraf.”

“What’s the H. stand for?”

“Harrod.”

“Like the king in the Bible?”

“Like the London department store.” Ehrengraf’s middle name was not Harrod, or Herod either, for that matter. He simply found untruths useful now and then, particularly in response to impertinence.

“Martin Harrod Ehrengraf,” said Terence Reginald Mayhew. “Well, you’re quite the dandy, aren’t you? Sorry the place isn’t spiffier but the cleaning woman only comes in once a week and she’s not due until the day after tomorrow. Not that she’s any great shakes with a dustcloth. Lazy slattern, in my opinion. You want to sit down?”

“No.”

“Probably scared to crease your pants.”

Ehrengraf was wearing a navy suit, a pale-blue-velvet vest, a blue shirt, a navy knit tie, and a pair of cordovan loafers. Mayhew was wearing a disgraceful terrycloth robe and tatty bedroom slippers. He had a scrawny body, a volleyball-shaped head, big guileless blue eyes, and red straw for hair. He was not so much ugly as bizarre; he looked like a cartoonist’s invention. Ehrengraf couldn’t guess how old he was — thirty? forty? fifty? — but it didn’t matter. The man was years from dying of old age.

“Well, aren’t you going to threaten me?”

“No,” Ehrengraf said.

“No threats? No hint of bodily harm? No pending lawsuits? No criminal prosecution?”

“Nothing of the sort.”

“Well, you’re an improvement on your predecessor,” Mayhew said. “That’s something. Why’d you come here, then? Not to see how the rich folks live. You slumming?”

“No.”

“Because it may be a rundown neighborhood, but it’s a good apartment. They’d get me out if they could. Rent control — I’ve been here for ages and my rent’s a pittance. Never find anything like this for what I can afford to pay. I get checks every month, you see. Disability. Small trust fund. Doesn’t add up to much, but I get by. Have the cleaning woman in once a week, pay the rent, eat decent food. Watch the TV, read my books and magazines, play my chess games by mail. Neighborhood’s gone down but I don’t live in the neighborhood. I live in the apartment. All I get of the neighborhood is seeing it from my window, and if it’s not fancy that’s all right with me. I’m a cripple, I’m confined to these four rooms, so I don’t care what the neighborhood’s like. If I was blind I wouldn’t care what color the walls were painted, would I? The more they take away from you, why, the less vulnerable you are.”