Lawrence Block

The Ehrengraf Nostrum

“In the world’s broad field of battle,

In the bivouac of Life,

Be not like dumb, driven cattle!

Be a hero in the strife!”

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Gardner Bridgewater paced to and fro over Martin Ehrengraf’s office carpet, reminding the little lawyer rather less of a caged jungle cat than — what? He doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus, Ehrengraf thought, echoing Shakespeare’s Cassius. But what, really, did a Colossus look like? Ehrengraf wasn’t sure, but the alleged uxoricide was unquestionably colossal, and there he was, bestriding all over the place as if determined to wear holes in the rug.

“If I’d wanted to kill the woman,” Bridgewater said, hitting one of his hands with the other, “I’d have damn well done it. By cracking her over the head with something heavy. A lamp base. A hammer. A fireplace poker.”

An anvil, Ehrengraf thought. A stove. A Volkswagen.

“Or I might have wrung her neck,” said Bridgewater, flexing his fingers. “Or I might have beaten her to death with my hands.”

Ehrengraf thought of Longfellow’s village blacksmith. “ ‘The smith, a mighty man is he, with large and sinewy hands,’ ” he murmured.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing important,” said Ehrengraf. “You’re saying, I gather, that if murderous impulses had overwhelmed you, you would have put them into effect in a more spontaneous and direct manner.”

“Well, I certainly wouldn’t have poisoned her. Poison’s sneaky. It’s the weapon of the weak, the devious, the cowardly.”

“And yet your wife was poisoned.”

“That’s what they say. After dinner Wednesday she complained of headache and nausea. She took a couple of pills and lay down for a nap. She got up feeling worse, couldn’t breathe. I rushed her to the hospital. Her heart ceased beating before I’d managed to fill out the questionnaire about medical insurance.”

“And the cause of death,” Ehrengraf said, “was a rather unusual poison.”

Bridgewater nodded. “Cydonex,” he said. “A tasteless, odorless, crystalline substance, a toxic hydrocarbon developed serendipitously as a by-product in the extrusion-molding of plastic dashboard figurines. Alyssa’s system contained enough Cydonex to kill a person twice her size.”

“You had recently purchased an eight-ounce canister of Cydonex.”

“I had,” Bridgewater said. “We had squirrels in the attic and I couldn’t get rid of the wretched little beasts. The branches of several of our trees are within leaping distance of our roof and attic windows, and squirrels have quite infested the premises. They’re noisy and filthy creatures, and clever at avoiding traps and poisoned baits. Isn’t it extraordinary that a civilization with the capacity to devise napalm and Agent Orange can’t come up with something for the control of rodents in a man’s attic?”

“So you decided to exterminate them with Cydonex?”

“I thought it was worth a try. I mixed it into peanut butter and put gobs of it here and there in the attic. Squirrels are mad for peanut butter, especially the crunchy kind. They’ll eat the creamy, but the crunchy really gets them.”

“And yet you discarded the Cydonex. Investigators found the almost full canister near the bottom of your garbage can.”

“I was worried about the possible effects. I recently saw a neighbor’s dog with a squirrel in his jaws, and it struck me that a poisoned squirrel, reeling from the effects of the Cydonex, might be easy prey for a neighborhood pet, who would in turn be the poison’s victim. Besides, as I said, poison’s a sneak’s weapon. Even a squirrel deserves a more direct approach.”

A narrow smile blossomed for an instant on Ehrengraf’s thin lips. Then it was gone. “One wonders,” he said, “how the Cydonex got into your wife’s system.”

“It’s a mystery to me, Mr. Ehrengraf. Unless poor Alyssa ate some peanut butter off the attic floor, I’m damned if I know where she got it.”

“Of course,” Ehrengraf said gently, “the police have their own theory.”

“The police.”

“Indeed. They seem to believe that you mixed a lethal dose of Cydonex into your wife’s wine at dinner. The poison, tasteless and odorless as it is, would have been undetectable in plain water, let alone wine. What sort of wine was it, if I may ask?”

“Nuits-St.-Georges.”

“And the main course?”

“Veal, I think. What difference does it make?”

“Nuits-St.-Georges would have overpowered the veal,” Ehrengraf said thoughtfully. “No doubt it would have overpowered the Cydonex as well. The police said the wineglasses had been washed out, although the rest of the dinner dishes remained undone.”

“The wineglasses are Waterford. I always do them up by hand, while Alyssa put everything else in the dishwasher.”

“Indeed.” Ehrengraf straightened up behind his desk, his hand fastening upon the knot of his tie. It was a small precise knot, and the tie itself was a two-inch-wide silk knit the approximate color of a bottle of Nuits-St.-Georges. The little lawyer wore a white-on-white shirt with French cuffs and a spread collar, and his suit was navy with a barely perceptible scarlet stripe. “As your lawyer,” he said, “I must raise some unpleasant points.”

“Go right ahead.”

“You have a mistress, a young woman who is expecting your child. You and your wife were not getting along. Your wife refused to give you a divorce. Your business, while extremely profitable, has been experiencing recent cash-flow problems. Your wife’s life was insured in the amount of five hundred thousand dollars with yourself as beneficiary. In addition, you are her sole heir, and her estate after taxes will still be considerable. Is all of that correct?”

“It is,” Bridgewater admitted. “The police found it significant.”

“I’m not surprised.”

Bridgewater leaned forward suddenly, placing his large and sinewy hands upon Ehrengraf’s desk. He looked capable of yanking the top off it and dashing it against the wall. “Mr. Ehrengraf,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper, “do you think I should plead guilty?”

“Of course not.”

“I could plead to a reduced charge.”

“But you’re innocent,” Ehrengraf said. “My clients are always innocent, Mr. Bridgewater. My fees are high, sir. One might even pronounce them towering. But I collect them only if I win an acquittal or if the charges against my client are peremptorily dismissed. I intend to demonstrate your innocence, Mr. Bridgewater, and my fee system provides me with the keenest incentive toward that end.”

“I see.”

“Now,” said Ehrengraf, coming out from behind his desk and rubbing his small hands briskly together, “let us look at the possibilities. Your wife ate the same meal you did, is that correct?”

“It is.”

“And drank the same wine?”

“Yes. The residue in the bottle was unpoisoned. But I could have put Cydonex directly into her glass.”

“But you didn’t, Mr. Bridgewater, so let us not weigh ourselves down with what you could have done. She became ill after the meal, I believe you said.”

“Yes. She was headachy and nauseous.”

“Headachy and nauseated, Mr. Bridgewater. That she was nauseous in the bargain would be a subjective conclusion of your own. She lay down for a nap?”

“Yes.”

“But first she took something.”

“Yes that’s right.”

“Aspirin, something of that sort?”

“I suppose it’s mostly aspirin,” Bridgewater said. “It’s a patent medicine called Darnitol. Alyssa took it for everything from cramps to athlete’s foot.”

“Darnitol,” Ehrengraf said. “An analgesic?”

“An analgesic, an anodyne, an antispasmodic, a panacea, a catholicon, a cure-all, a nostrum. Alyssa believed in it, Mr. Ehrengraf, and my guess would be that her belief was responsible for much of the preparation’s efficacy. I don’t take pills, never have, and my headaches seemed to pass as quickly as hers.” He laughed shortly. “In any event, Darnitol proved an inadequate antidote for Cydonex.”

“Hmm,” said Ehrengraf.

“To think it was the Darnitol that killed her.”

Five weeks had passed since their initial meeting, and events in the interim had done a great deal to improve both the circumstances and the spirit of Ehrengraf’s client. Gardner Bridgewater was no longer charged with his wife’s murder.

“It was one of the first things I thought of,” Ehrengraf said. “The police had their vision clouded by the extraordinary coincidence of your purchase and use of Cydonex as a vehicle for the extermination of squirrels. But my view was based on the presumption of your innocence, and I was able to discard this coincidence as irrelevant. It wasn’t until other innocent men and women began to die of Cydonex poisoning that a pattern began to emerge. A schoolteacher in Kenmore. A retired steelworker in Lackawanna. A young mother in Orchard Park.”

“And more,” Bridgewater said. “Eleven in all, weren’t there?”

“Twelve,” Ehrengraf said. “But for diabolical cleverness on the part of the poisoner, he could never have gotten away with it for so long.”

“I don’t understand how he managed it.”

“By leaving no incriminating residue,” Ehrengraf explained. “We’ve had poisoners of this sort before, tainting tablets of some nostrum or other. And there was a man in Boston, I believe it was, who stirred arsenic into the sugar in coffee-shop dispensers. With any random mass murder of that sort, sooner or later a pattern emerges. But this killer only tampered with a single capsule in each bottle of Darnitol. The victim might consume capsules with impunity until the one fatal pill was swallowed, whereupon there would be no evidence remaining in the bottle, no telltale leftover capsule to give the police a clue.”

“Good heavens.”

“Indeed. The police did in fact test as a matter of course the bottles of Darnitol which were invariably found among the victims’ effects. But the pills invariably proved innocent. Finally, when the death toll mounted high enough, the fact that Darnitol was associated with every single death proved indismissable. The police seized drugstore stocks of the painkiller, and again and again bottles turned out to have a single tainted capsule in with the legitimate pills.”

“And the actual killer—”

“Will be found, I shouldn’t doubt, in the course of time.” Ehrengraf straightened his tie, a stylish specimen showing a half-inch stripe of royal blue flanked by two narrower stripes, one of gold and the other of a vivid green, all displayed on a field of navy. The tie was that of the Caedmon Society, and it brought back memories. “Some disgruntled employee of the Darnitol manufacturer, I shouldn’t wonder,” said Ehrengraf carelessly. “That’s usually the case in this sort of affair. Or some unbalanced chap who took the pill himself and was unhappy with the results. Twelve dead, plus your wife of course, and a company on the verge of ruin, because I shouldn’t think too many people are rushing down to their local pharmacy and purchasing Extra-Strength Darnitol.”

“There’s a joke going round,” Bridgewater said, flexing his large and sinewy hands. “Patient calls his doctor, says he’s got a headache, an upset stomach, whatever. Doctor says, ‘Take two Darnitol and call me in the Hereafter.’ ”

“Indeed.”

Bridgewater sighed. “I suppose,” he said, “the real killer may never be found.”

“Oh, I suspect he will,” Ehrengraf said. “In the interests of rounding things out, you know. And, speaking of rounding things out, sir, if you’ve your checkbook with you—”

“Ah, yes,” said Bridgewater. He made his check payable to Martin H. Ehrengraf and filled in the sum, which was a large one. He paused then, his pen hovering over the space for his signature. Perhaps he reflected for a moment on the curious business of paying so great an amount to a person who, on the face of it, had taken no concrete action on his behalf.

But who is to say what thoughts go through a man’s mind? Bridgewater signed the check, tore it from the checkbook, and presented it with a flourish.

“What would you drink with veal?” he demanded.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You said the Nuits-St.-Georges would be overpowering with veal. What would you choose?”

“I shouldn’t choose veal in the first place. I don’t eat meat.”

“Don’t eat meat?” Bridgewater, who looked as though he might cheerfully consume a whole lamb at a sitting, was incredulous. “What do you eat?”

“Tonight I’m having a nut-and-soybean casserole,” the little lawyer said. He blew on the check to dry the ink, folded it, and put it away. “Nuit-St.-Georges should do nicely with it,” he said. “Or perhaps a good bottle of Chambertin.”

The Chambertin and the nut-and-soybean casserole that it had so superbly complemented were but a memory four days later when a uniformed guard ushered the little lawyer into the cell where Evans Wheeler awaited him. The lawyer, neatly turned out in a charcoal-gray-flannel suit with a nipped-in waist, a Wedgwood-blue shirt, and a navy tie with a below-the-knot design, contrasted sharply in appearance with his prospective client. Wheeler, as awkwardly tall and thin as a young Lincoln, wore striped overalls and a denim shirt. His footwear consisted of a pair of chain-store running shoes. The lawyer wore highly polished cordovan loafers.

And yet, Ehrengraf noted, the young man was poised enough in his casual costume. It suited him, even to the stains and chemical burns on the overalls and the ragged patch on one elbow of the workshirt.

“Mr. Ehrengraf,” said Wheeler, extending a bony hand. “Pardon the uncomfortable surroundings. They don’t go out of their way to make suspected mass murderers comfortable.” He smiled ruefully. “The newspapers are calling it the crime of the century.”

“That’s nonsense,” said Ehrengraf. “The century’s not over yet. But the crime’s unarguably a monumental one, sir, and the evidence against you would seem to be particularly damning.”

“That’s why I want you on my side, Mr. Ehrengraf.”

“Well,” said Ehrengraf.

“I know your reputation, sir. You’re a miracle worker, and it looks as though that’s what I need.”

“What you very likely need,” Ehrengraf said, “is a master of delaying tactics. Someone who can stall your case for as long as possible to let some of the heat of the moment be discharged. Then, when public opinion has lost some of its fury, he can arrange for you to plead guilty to homicide while of unsound mind. Some sort of insanity defense might work, or might at least reduce the severity of your sentence.”

“But I’m innocent, Mr. Ehrengraf.”

“I wouldn’t presume to say otherwise, Mr. Wheeler, but I don’t know that I’d be the right person to undertake your defense. I charge high fees, you see, which I collect only in the event that my clients are entirely exonerated. This tends to limit the nature of my clients.”

“To those who can afford you.”

“I’ve defended paupers. I’ve defended the poor as a court-appointed attorney and I volunteered my services on behalf of a penniless poet. But in the ordinary course of things, my clients seem to have two things in common. They can afford my high fees. And, of course, they’re innocent.”

“I’m innocent.”

“Indeed.”

“And I’m a long way from being a pauper, Mr. Ehrengraf. You know that I used to work for Triage Corporation, the manufacturer of Darnitol.”

“So I understand.”

“You know that I resigned six months ago.”

“After a dispute with your employer.”

“Not a dispute,” Wheeler said. “I told him where he could resituate a couple of test tubes. You see, I was in a position to make the suggestion, although I don’t know that he was in a position to follow it. On my own time I’d developed a process for extenuating lapiform polymers so as to produce a variable-stress oxypolymer capable of withstanding—”

Wheeler went on to explain just what the oxypolymer was capable of withstanding, and Ehrengraf wondered what the young man was talking about. He tuned in again to hear him say, “And so my royalty on the process in the first year will be in excess of six hundred fifty thousand dollars, and I’m told that’s only the beginning.”

“Only the beginning,” said Ehrengraf.

“I haven’t sought other employment because there doesn’t seem to be much point in it, and I haven’t changed my lifestyle because I’m happy as I am. But I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in prison, Mr. Ehrengraf, nor do I want to escape on some technicality and be loathed by my neighbors for the remainder of my days. I want to be exonerated and I don’t care what it costs me.”

“Of course you do,” said Ehrengraf, drawing himself stiffly erect. “Of course you do. After all, son, you’re innocent.”

“Exactly.”

“Although,” Ehrengraf said with a sigh, “your innocence may be rather tricky to prove. The evidence—”

“Is overpowering.”

“Like Nuits-St.-Georges with veal. A search of your workroom revealed a half-full container of Cydonex. You denied ever having seen it before.”

“Absolutely.”

Ehrengraf frowned. “I wonder if you mightn’t have purchased it as an aid to pest control. Rats are troublesome. One is always being plagued by rats in one’s cellar, mice in one’s pantry, squirrels in one’s attic—”

“And bats in one’s belfry, I suppose, but my house has always been comfortingly free of vermin. I keep a cat. I suppose that helps.”

“I’m sure it must, but I don’t know that it helps your case. You seem to have purchased Cydonex from a chemical-supply house on North Division Street, where your signature appears in the poison-control ledger.”

“A forgery.”

“No doubt, but a convincing one. Bottles of Darnitol, some unopened, others with a single Cydonex-filled capsule added, were found on a closet shelf in your home. They seem to be from the same lot as those used to murder thirteen people.”

“I was framed, Mr. Ehrengraf.”

“And cleverly so, it would seem.”

“I never bought Cydonex. I never heard of Cydonex — not until people started dying of it.”

“Oh? You worked for the plastics company that discovered the substance. That was before you took employment with the Darnitol people.”

“It was also before Cydonex was invented. You know those dogs people mount on their dashboards and the head bobs up and down when you drive?”

“Not when I drive,” Ehrengraf said.

“Nor I either, but you know what I mean. My job was finding a way to make the dogs’ eyes more realistic. If you had a dog bobbing on your dashboard, would you even want the eyes to be more realistic?”

“Well,” said Ehrengraf.

“Exactly. I quit that job and went to work for the Darnitol folks, and then my previous employer found a better way to kill rats, and so it looks as though I’m tied into the murders in two different ways. But actually I’ve never had anything to do with Cydonex and I’ve never so much as swallowed a Darnitol, let alone paid good money for that worthless snake oil.”

“Someone bought those pills.”

“Yes, but it wasn’t—”

“And someone purchased that Cydonex. And forged your name to the ledger.”

“Yes.”

“And planted the bottles of Darnitol on drugstore and supermarket shelves after fatally tampering with their contents.”

“Yes.”

“And waited for the random victims to buy the pills, to work their way through the bottle until they ingested the deadly capsule, and to die in agony. And planted evidence to incriminate you.”

“Yes.”

“And made an anonymous call to the police to put them on your trail.” Ehrengraf permitted himself a slight smile, one that did not quite reach his eyes. “And there he made his mistake,” he said. “He could have waited for nature to take its course, just as he had already waited for the Darnitol to do its deadly work. The police were checking on ex-employees of Triage Corporation. They’d have gotten to you sooner or later. But he wanted to hurry matters along, and that proves you were framed, sir, because who but the man who framed you would ever think to have called the police?”

“So the very phone call that got me on the hook serves to get me off the hook?”

“Ah,” said Ehrengraf, “would that it were that easy.”

Unlike Gardner Bridgewater, young Evans Wheeler proved a model of repose. Instead of pacing back and forth across Ehrengraf’s carpet, the chemist sat in Ehrengraf’s overstuffed leather chair, one long leg crossed over the other. His costume was virtually identical to the garb he had worn in prison, although an eye as sharp as Ehrengraf’s could detect a different pattern to the stains and acid burns that gave character to the striped overalls. And this denim shirt, Ehrengraf noted, had no patch upon its elbow. Yet.

Ehrengraf, seated at his desk, wore a Dartmouth-green blazer over tan flannel slacks. As was his custom on such occasions, his tie was once again the distinctive Caedmon Society cravat.

“Ms. Joanna Pellatrice,” Ehrengraf said. “A teacher of seventh- and eighth-grade social studies at Kenmore Junior High School. Unmarried, twenty-eight years of age, and living alone in three rooms on Deerhurst Avenue.”

“One of the killer’s first victims.”

“That she was. The very first victim, in point of fact, although Ms. Pellatrice was not the first to die. Her murderer took one of the capsules from her bottle of Darnitol, pried it open, disposed of the innocent if ineffectual powder within, and replaced it with the lethal Cydonex. Then he put it back in her bottle, returned the bottle to her medicine cabinet or purse, and waited for the unfortunate woman to get a headache or cramps or whatever impelled her to swallow the capsules.”

“Whatever it was,” Wheeler said, “they wouldn’t work.”

“This one did, when she finally got to it. In the meantime, her intended murderer had already commenced spreading little bottles of joy all over the metropolitan area, one capsule to each bottle. There was danger in doing so, in that the toxic nature of Darnitol might come to light before Ms. Pellatrice took her pill and went to that big classroom in the sky. But he reasoned, correctly it would seem, that a great many persons would die before Darnitol was seen to be the cause of death. And indeed this proved to be the case. Ms. Pellatrice was the fourth victim, and there were to be many more.”

“And the killer—”

“Refused to leave well enough alone. His name is George Grodek, and he’d had an affair with Ms. Pellatrice, although married to another teacher all the while. The affair evidently meant rather more to Mr. Grodek than it did to Ms. Pellatrice. He had made scenes, once at her apartment, once at her school during a midterm examination. The newspapers describe him as a disappointed suitor, and I suppose the term’s as apt as any.”

“You say he refused to leave well enough alone.”

“Indeed,” said Ehrengraf. “If he’d been content with depopulating the area and sinking Triage Corporation, I’m sure he’d have gotten away with it. The police would have had their hands full checking people with a grudge against Triage, known malcontents and mental cases, and the sort of chaps who get themselves into messes of that variety. But he has a neat sort of mind, has Mr. Grodek, and so he managed to learn of your existence and decided to frame you for the chain of murders.”

Ehrengraf brushed a piece of lint from his lapel. “He did a workmanlike job,” he said, “but it broke down on close examination. That signature in the poison-control book did turn out to be a forgery, and matching forgeries of your name — trials, if you will — turned up in a notebook hidden away in a dresser drawer in his house.”

“That must have been hard for him to explain.”

“So were the bottles of Darnitol in another drawer of the dresser. So was the Cydonex, and so was the little machine for filling and closing the capsules, and a whole batch of broken capsules which evidently represented unsuccessful attempts at pill-making.”

“Funny he didn’t flush it all down the toilet.”

“Successful criminals become arrogant,” Ehrengraf explained. “They believe themselves to be untouchable. Grodek’s arrogance did him in. It led him to frame you, and to tip the police to you.”

“And your investigation did what no police investigation could do.”

“It did,” said Ehrengraf, “because mine started from the premise of your innocence. If you were innocent, someone else was guilty. If someone else was guilty and had framed you, that someone must have had a motive for the crime. If the crime had a motive, the murderer must have had a reason to kill one of the specific victims. And if that was the case, one had only to look to the victims to find the killer.”

“You make it sound so simple,” said Wheeler. “And yet if I hadn’t had the good fortune to engage your services, I’d be spending the rest of my life in prison.”

“I’m glad you see it that way,” Ehrengraf said, “because the size of my fee might otherwise seem excessive.” He named a figure, whereupon the chemist promptly uncapped a pen and wrote out a check.

“I’ve never written a check for so large a sum,” he said reflectively.

“Few people have.”

“Nor have I ever gotten greater value for my money. How fortunate I am that you believed in me, in my innocence.”

“I never doubted it for a moment.”

“You know who else claims to be innocent? Poor Grodek. I understand the madman’s screaming in his cell, shouting to the world that he never killed anyone.” Wheeler flashed a mischevious smile. “Perhaps he should hire you, Mr. Ehrengraf.”

“Oh, dear,” said Ehrengraf. “No, I think not. I can sometimes work miracles, Mr. Wheeler, or what have the appearance of miracles, but I can work them only on behalf of the innocent. And I don’t think the power exists to persuade me of poor Mr. Grodek’s innocence. No, I fear the man is guilty, and I’m afraid he’ll be forced to pay for what he’s done.” The little lawyer shook his head. “Do you know Longfellow, Mr. Wheeler?”

“Old Henry Wadsworth, you mean? ‘By the shores of Gitche Gumee, by the something Big-Sea-Water’? That Longfellow?”

“The shining Big-Sea-Water,” said Ehrengraf. “Another client reminded me of ‘The Village Blacksmith,’ and I’ve been looking into Longfellow lately. Do you care for poetry, Mr. Wheeler?”

“Not too much.”

“ ‘In the world’s broad field of battle,’ ” Ehrengraf said,

“ ‘In the bivouac of Life,

“ ‘Be not like dumb, driven cattle!

“ ‘Be a hero in the strife!’ ”

“Well,” said Evans Wheeler, “I suppose that’s good advice, isn’t it?”

“None better, sir. ‘Let us then be up and doing, with a heart for any fate; still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait.’ ”

“Ah, yes,” said Wheeler.

“ ‘Learn to labor and to wait,’ ” said Ehrengraf. “That’s the ticket, eh? ‘To labor and to wait.’ Longfellow, Mr. Wheeler. Listen to the poets, Mr. Wheeler. The poets have the answers, haven’t they?” And Ehrengraf smiled, with his lips and with his eyes.

Content

Lawrence Block
The Ehrengraf Nostrum