Defender of the Innocent: The Casebook of Martin Ehrengraf Read Free Page A

believe. I have my fee. You have your son. The police have another line of inquiry to pursue altogether. It would seem we’ve all come out of this well, wouldn’t you say? Put your mind at rest, Mrs. Culhane, dear Mrs. Culhane. There’s the elevator down the hall on your left. If you ever need my services you know where I am and how to reach me. And perhaps recommend me to your friends. But discreetly, dear lady. Discreetly. Discretion is everything in matters of this sort.”
    Mrs. Culhane walked very carefully down the hall to the elevator and rang the bell and waited. And she did not look back. Not once.
     

 
    THE E HRENGRAF
    Presumption
----
    “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
    Where wealth accumulates and men decay.”
    —Oliver Goldsmith
     
    “N ow let me get this straight,” Alvin Gort said. “You actually accept criminal cases on a contingency basis. Even homicide cases?”
    “Especially homicide cases.”
    “If your client is acquitted he pays your fee. If he’s found guilty, then your efforts on his behalf cost him nothing whatsoever. Except expenses, I assume.”
    “That’s very true,” Martin Ehrengraf said. The little lawyer supplied a smile which blossomed briefly on his thin lips while leaving his eyes quite uninvolved. “Shall I explain in detail?”
    “By all means.”
    “To take your last point first, I pay my own expenses and furnish no accounting of them to my client. My fees are thus all-inclusive. By the same token, should a client of mine be convicted he would owe me nothing. I would absorb such expenses as I might incur acting on his behalf.”
    “That’s remarkable.”
    “It’s surely unusual, if not unique. Now the rest of what you’ve said is essentially true. It’s not uncommon for attorneys to take on negligence cases on a contingency basis, participating handsomely in the settlement when they win, sharing their clients’ losses when they do not. The principle has always made eminent good sense to me. Why shouldn’t a client give substantial value for value received? Why should he be simply charged for service, whether or not the service does him any good? When I pay out money, Mr. Gort, I like to get what I pay for. And I don’t mind paying for what I get.”
    “It certainly makes sense to me,” Alvin Gort said. He dug a cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket, scratched a match, drew smoke into his lungs. This was his first experience in a jail cell and he’d been quite surprised to learn that he was allowed to have matches on his person, to wear his own clothes rather than prison garb, to keep money in his pocket and a watch on his wrist.
    No doubt all this would change if and when he were convicted of murdering his wife. Then he’d be in an actual prison and the rules would most likely be more severe. Here they had taken his belt as a precaution against suicide, and they would have taken the laces from his shoes had he not been wearing loafers at the time of his arrest. But it could have been worse.
    And unless Ehrengraf pulled off a small miracle, it would be worse.
    “Sometimes my clients never see the inside of a courtroom,” Ehrengraf was saying now. “I’m always happiest when I can save them not merely from prison but from going to trial in the first place. So you should understand that whether or not I collect my fee hinges on your fate, on the disposition of your case—and not on how much work I put in or how much time it takes me to liberate you. In other words, from the moment you retain me I have an interest in your future, and the moment you are released and all charges dropped, my fee becomes due and payable in full.”
    “And your fee will be—?”
    “One hundred thousand dollars,” Ehrengraf said crisply.
    Alvin Gort considered the sum, then nodded thoughtfully. It was not difficult to believe that the diminutive attorney commanded and received large fees. Alvin Gort recognized good clothing when he saw it, and the