Defender of the Innocent: The Casebook of Martin Ehrengraf by Lawrence Block Page A

was a thickset round-shouldered man in his late thirties with the ample belly of a beer drinker and the red nose of a whiskey drinker. His pudgy face recalled the Pillsbury Dough Boy. His hands, too, were pudgy, and he held them out in front of his red nose and studied them in wonder.
    “These were the hands that did it,” he said.
    “Nonsense.”
    “How’s that?”
    “Perhaps you’d better tell me what happened,” Ehrengraf suggested. “The night your wife was killed.”
    “It’s hard to remember,” Protter said.
    “I’m sure it is.”
    “What it was, it was an ordinary kind of a night. Me and Gretch had a beer or two during the afternoon, just passing time while we watched television. Then we ordered up a pizza and had a couple more with it, and then we settled in for the evening and started hitting the boilermakers. You know, a shot and a beer. First thing you know, we’re having this argument.”
    “About what?”
    Protter got up, paced, glared again at his hands. He lumbered about, Ehrengraf thought, like a caged bear. His chino pants were ragged at the cuffs and his plaid shirt was a tartan no Highlander would recognize. Ehrengraf, in contrast, sparkled in the drab cell like a diamond on a dustheap. His suit was a herringbone tweed the color of a well-smoked briar pipe, and beneath it he wore a suede doeskin vest over a cream broadcloth shirt with French cuffs and a tab collar. His cufflinks were simple gold hexagons, his tie a wool knit in the same brown as his suit. His shoes were shell cordovan loafers, quite simple and elegant and polished to a high sheen.
    “The argument,” Ehrengraf prompted.
    “Oh, I don’t know how it got started,” Protter said. “One thing led to another, and pretty soon she’s making a federal case over me and this woman who lives one flight down from us.”
    “What woman?”
    “Her name’s Agnes Mullane. Gretchen’s giving me the business that me and Agnes got something going.”
    “And were you having an affair with Agnes Mullane?”
    “Naw, ’course not. Maybe me and Agnes’d pass the time of day on the staircase, and maybe I had some thoughts on the subject, but nothing ever came of it. But she started in on the subject, Gretch did, and to get a little of my own back I started ragging her about this guy lives one flight up from us.”
    “And his name is—”
    “Gates, Harry Gates.”
    “You thought your wife was having an affair with Gates?”
    Protter shook his head. “Naw, ’course not. But he’s an artist, Gates is, and I was accusing her of posing for him, you know. Naked. No clothes on.”
    “Nude.”
    “Yeah.”
    “And did your wife pose for Mr. Gates?”
    “You kidding? You never met Gretchen, did you?”
    Ehrengraf shook his head.
    “Well, Gretch was all right, and the both of us was used to each other, if you know what I mean, but you wouldn’t figure her for somebody who woulda been Miss America if she coulda found her way to Atlantic City. And Gates, what would he need with a model?”
    “You said he was an artist.”
    “He says he’s an artist,” Protter said, “but you couldn’t prove it by me. What he paints don’t look like nothing. I went up there one time on account of his radio’s cooking at full blast, you know, and I want to ask him to put a lid on it, and he’s up on top of this stepladder dribbling paint on a canvas that he’s got spread out all over the floor. All different colors of paint, and he’s just throwing them down at the canvas like a little kid making a mess.”
    “Then he’s an abstract expressionist,” Ehrengraf said.
    “Naw, he’s a painter. I mean, people buy these pictures of his. Not enough to make him rich or he wouldn’t be living in the same dump with me and Gretch, but he makes a living at it. Enough to keep him in beer and pizza and all, but what would he need with a model? Only reason he’d want Gretchen up there is to hold the ladder steady.”
    “An abstract expressionist,”