Defender of the Innocent: The Casebook of Martin Ehrengraf (17 page)

“I
nnocent,” Dale McCandless said. “What a concept.”

“All my clients are innocent,” Ehrengraf told him. “That’s what makes my work so gratifying. That and the fees, of course.”

“Speaking of which,” McCandless said, “you can set your mind to rest on that score. Even if they wind up finding me guilty and that keeps me from inheriting from my parents, I’ve still got more than enough to cover whatever you charge me. See, I came into a nice piece of change when my grandmother passed away.”

“Is that what enabled you to buy a house of your own?”

“It set me up pretty good. I’ve got the house and I’ve got money in the bank. See, I was her sole heir, so when she took a tumble on the back staircase, everything she had came to me.”

“She fell down the stairs?”

McCandless nodded. “They ought to do something about that staircase,” he said. “Three months earlier, my grandfather fell down those same stairs and broke his neck.”

“And left all his money to your grandmother,” Ehrengraf said.

“Right.”

“Who in turn left it to you.”

“Yeah. Handy, huh?”

“Indeed,” said Ehrengraf. “It must have been a frightening thing for an old woman, tumbling down a flight of stairs.”

“Maybe not,” McCandless said. “According to the autopsy, she was already dead when she fell. So what probably happened is she had a heart attack while she was standing at the top of the stairs and never felt a thing.”

“A heart attack.”

“Or a stroke or something,” McCandless said carefully. “Or maybe she was sleeping and a pillow got stuck over her face and suffocated her.”

“The pillow just got stuck on top of her face?”

“Well, she was old,” McCandless said. “Who knows what could happen?”

“And then, after the pillow smothered her, how do you suppose she got from her bed to the staircase?”

“Sleepwalking,” McCandless said.

“Of course,” said Ehrengraf. “I should have thought of that.”

“My parents lived in this ranch house,” McCandless said. “Big sprawling thing, lots of square footage but all of it on one level. No basement and no attic.” He sighed. “In other words, no stairs.” He shook his head ruefully. “Point is, there was never any problem about my grandparents’ death, so I’ve got some money of my own. So you don’t have to worry about your fee.”

Ehrengraf drew himself up straight. He was a small man, but his perfect posture and impeccably-tailored raw silk suit lent him stature beyond his height. “There will be no fee,” he said, “unless you are found innocent.”

“Huh?”

“My longstanding policy, Mr. McCandless. My fees are quite considerable, but they are payable only in the event that my client is exonerated. As it happens, I rarely see the inside of a courtroom. My clients are innocent, and their innocence always wins out in the long run. I do what I can toward that end, often working behind the scenes. And, when charges are dropped, when the real killer confesses, when my client’s innocence has been demonstrated to the satisfaction of the legal system, then and only then do I profit from my efforts on his behalf.”

McCandless was silent for a long moment. At length he fixed his eyes on the little lawyer. “We got ourselves a problem,” he said. “See, just between you and me, I did it.”

“W
ith stairs,” young McCandless was saying, “it might have been entirely different. Especially with Mom in the wheelchair. Good steep flight of stairs and it’s a piece of cake. Instead I went out and got the gun, and then I bought the gloves.”

“Gloves?”

“A size too small,” McCandless said. “To leave at the crime scene. I thought—well, never mind what I thought. I guess I wasn’t thinking too clearly. Hey, that reminds me. You think maybe a Dim Cap defense would turn the trick?”

“Innocent by reason of diminished capacity?”

“Yeah. See, I did a couple of lines of DTT before I went out and bought the gloves.”

“Do you mean DDT? The insecticide?”

“Naw, DTT. It’s short for di-tetra thiazole, it’s a tranquilizer for circus animals, but if you snort it it sort of mellows you out. What I could do, though, is I could forget about the DTT and tell people I ate a Twinkie.”

Court TV, Ehrengraf thought, had a lot to answer for. “You got the gun,” he prompted his client, “and you bought the gloves . . .”

“And I went over there and did what I had to do. But of course I don’t remember that part.”

“You don’t?”

McCandless shook his head. “Not a thing, from the time I parked the car in their driveway until I woke up hours later in my own bed. See, I never remember. I don’t remember doing my grandparents, either. It’s all because of the EKG.”

“I’m not sure I follow you,” said Ehrengraf, rather understating the matter. “You had an electrocardiogram?”

“That’s for your heart, isn’t it? My heart’s fine. No, EKG’s this powder, you roll it up and smoke it. I couldn’t tell you what the initials stand for, but it was originally developed as a fertilizer for African violets. They had to take it off the market when they found out what it did to people.”

“What does it do?”

“I guess it gets you high,” McCandless said, “but I don’t know for sure. See, what happens is you take it and you black out. It’s the same story every time I smoke it. I light up, I take the first puff, and the next thing I remember I’m waking up in my own bed hours later. So I couldn’t tell you what it feels like. All I know is what it lets me do while I’m operating behind it. And so far it’s let me do my grandparents and my mother and father.”

“I knew it,” Ehrengraf said.

“How’s that?”

“I knew you were innocent,” he said. “I knew it. Mr. McCandless, you have no memory whatsoever of any of those killings, is that what you’re telling me?”

“Yeah, but—”

“You may have intended to do those persons harm. But it was so much against your nature that you had to ingest a dangerous controlled substance in order to gird yourself for the task. Is that correct?”

“Well, more or less, but—”

“And you have no recollection of committing any crimes whatsoever. You believe yourself to be guilty, and as a result you are in a jail cell charged with a hideous crime. Do you see the problem, sir? The problem is not what you have done, because in fact you have done nothing. The problem is what you believe.”

McCandless looked at him.

“If you don’t believe in your own innocence,” Ehrengraf demanded, “how can the rest of the world believe in it? Your thoughts are powerful, Mr. McCandless. And right now your own negative thoughts are damning you as a murderer.”

“But—”

“You must affirm your innocence, sir.”

“Okay,” McCandless agreed. “‘I’m innocent.’ How’s that?”

“It’s a start,” Ehrengraf said. He opened his briefcase, drew out a yellow legal pad, produced a pen. “But it takes more than a simple declaration to change your own thoughts on the matter. What I want you to do is affirm your innocence in writing.”

“Just write ‘I’m innocent’ over and over?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that.” Ehrengraf uncapped the pen and drew a vertical line down the center of the page. “Here’s what you do,” he said. “Over here on the left you write ‘I am completely innocent.’ Then on the right you immediately write down the first negative response to that sentence that pops into your mind.”

“Fair enough.” McCandless took the pad and pen.
I am completely innocent
, he wrote in the left-hand column.
What a load of crap
, he wrote at once on the right.

“Excellent,” Ehrengraf assured him. “Now keep going, but with a different response each time.”

“Just keep going?”

“Until you get to the bottom of the page,” Ehrengraf said.

The pen raced over the paper, as McCandless no sooner proclaimed his complete innocence than he dashed off a repudiation of it. When he’d reached the bottom of the page, Ehrengraf took the pad from him.

“Excellent,” Ehrengraf said.

“You think so? If the District Attorney got a hold of that . . .”

“Ah, but he won’t, will he?” Ehrengraf crumpled the paper, stuffed it into a pocket, handed the legal pad back to his client. “All of those negative thoughts,” he explained, “have been festering in your mind and soul, preventing you from believing in your own untarnished innocence. By letting them surface this way, we can stamp them out and affirm your own true nature.”

“My own true nature’s nothing to brag about,” McCandless said.

“That’s your negativity talking,” Ehrengraf told him. “At heart you’re an innocent child of God.” He pointed to the legal pad, made scribbling motions in the air. “You’ve got work to do,” he said.

“I
hope you got another of those yellow pads there,” Dale McCandless said. “It’s a funny thing. I was never much of a writer, and in school it was torture for me to write a two-page composition for English class. You know, ‘
How I Spent My Summer Vacation
’?”

Ehrengraf, who could well imagine how a young McCandless might have spent his summer vacation, was diplomatically silent.

“But this time around,” McCandless said, “I’ve been writing up a storm. What’s it been, five days since you got me started? Well, I ran through that pad you gave me, and I got one of the guards to bring me this little notebook, but I like the pads better. Here, look at what I wrote this morning.”

Ehrengraf unfolded a sheet of unlined white paper. McCandless had drawn a line down its center, writing his affirmation over and over again in the left-hand column, jotting down his responses to the right.

“You’ve come a long way,” Ehrengraf told his client. “You see how the nature of your responses is changing.”

“It seems like magic,” McCandless said.

“The magic of affirmation.”

“All along, I would just write down the first thing that popped into my head. But the old bad stuff just stopped popping in.”

“You cleared it away.”

“I don’t know what I did,” McCandless said. “Maybe I just wore it out. But it got to the point where it didn’t seem natural to write that I was a born killer.”

“Because you’re not.”

“I guess.”

“And how do you feel now, Mr. McCandless? Without a pen in your hand, just talking face to face? Are you innocent of the crimes of which you stand accused?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“It’s almost too much to hope for,” the young man said. “but maybe I am. I could be, couldn’t I? I really could be.”

Ehrengraf beamed. “Indeed you are,” he said, “and it’s my job to prove it. And yours—” he opened his briefcase, provided his client with a fresh legal pad “—yours to further affirm that innocence until there is no room in your consciousness for doubt and negativity. You’ve got work to do, Mr. McCandless. Are you up for it?”

Eagerly, McCandless reached for the pad.

“L
ittle Bobby Bickerstaff,” McCandless said, shaking his head in wonder.

Ehrengraf’s hand went to the knot of his necktie, adjusting it imperceptibly. The tie was that of the Caedmon Society, and Ehrengraf was not entitled to wear it, never having been a member of that organization. It was, however, his invariable choice for occasions of triumph, and this was just such an occasion.

“I never would have dreamed it,” McCandless said. “Not in a million years.”

“You knew him, then?”

“We went to grade school together. In fact we were in the same class until I got held back. You know something?
That’s
hard to believe, too.”

“That you’d be held back? I must say I find it hard to believe myself. You’re an intelligent young man.”

“Oh, it wasn’t for that. It was for deportment. You know, talking in class, throwing chalk.”

“High spirits,” Ehrengraf said.

“Setting fires,” McCandless went on. “Breaking windows. Doing cars.”

“Doing cars?”

“Teachers’ cars,” the young man explained. “Icepicking the tires, or sugaring the gas tank, or keying the paint job. Or doing the windows.”

“Bricking them,” Ehrengraf suggested.

“I suppose you could call it that. That’s what’s hard to believe, Mr. Ehrengraf. That I did those things.”

“I see.”

“I used to be like that,” he said, and frowned in thought. “Or maybe I just used to
think
I was that way, and that’s why I did bad things.”

“Ah,” Ehrengraf said.

“All along I was innocent,” McCandless said, groping for the truth. “But I didn’t know it, I had this belief I was bad, and when I was a little kid it made me do bad things.”

“Precisely.”

“And I got in trouble, and they blamed me even when I didn’t do anything bad, and that convinced me I was really bad, bad clear to the bone. And . . . and . . .”

The youth put his head in his hands and sobbed.

“There, there,” Ehrengraf said softly, and clapped him on the shoulder.

After a moment McCandless got hold of himself and said, “But little Bobby Bickerstaff. I can’t get over it.”

“He killed your parents,” Ehrengraf said.

“It’s so hard to believe. I always thought of him as a little goody-goody.”

“A nice quiet boy,” Ehrengraf said.

“Yeah, well, those are the ones who lose it, aren’t they? They pop off one day and the neighbors can’t believe it, same as I can’t believe it myself about Bobby. What was the name of the couple he killed?”