Ehrengraf for the Defense Read Online Free Page B

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 that his own memory could have
departed so utterly from reality? Had the twin shocks of Ginnie’s
death and of his own 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