The Ehrengraf Fandango

Ehrengraf, wearing a cocoa brown blazer over a pair of cream-colored flannel trousers, stepped gingerly over the threshold and into the little room reserved for attorney-client meetings. In its center stood a table, bolted to the floor, and on either side of the table was a chair, rendered immobile in the same fashion.

A young woman occupied one of the chairs and looked up at the little lawyer’s approach. She was tall and slender, with nut-brown hair framing an oval face that would have delighted Modigliani. Mentally, Ehrengraf supplied her with the color and sparkle of which recent events had deprived her. He could tell that she’d be a beauty.

“Mr. Ehrengraf,” she said.

“Ms. Plumley.”

“Can we talk here?”

“That’s the room’s purpose,” Ehrengraf said. “It’s supposed to be preferable to meeting in a cell.”

“And I suppose it is. But can what we say be heard?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said.

Which, he thought, was accurate, if not entirely responsive. Sitting in that room, breathing its stale air, Ehrengraf recalled a very different room, one he’d encountered a few years ago when business had called him to New York. There, a pebble’s throw from Carnegie Hall, he dined in a restaurant with an interior designed by the artist Milton Glaser. He recalled patterned tile rugs set into the tiled floor, but more than that he remembered the motif of super-sized representations of the human anatomy, sculpted and hanging on the walls. Here a disembodied nose, there a pair of sculpted lips. And, most memorably, an enormous ear.

The room’s décor was as over-the-top as this room’s was austere, even non-existent. But Ehrengraf imagined its walls covered with ears, thousands of ears, big ears and little ears, all of them listening, for what else did ears do?

But he wouldn’t worry about it.

“Actually,” Cheryl Plumley said, “there’s no reason for me to worry about it. Everyone knows I did it.”

Responses sprang up in Ehrengraf’s mind and dematerialized before they reached his lips. He waited.

“That’s why I insisted they call you,” she went on. “‘You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney.’ I felt as though I was in a crime show on television. Reading me my rights. I mean, I was ready to change my name to Miranda.”

“You were right to call me.”

“Oh, I knew that was the thing to do. I don’t remember who it was I heard it from, but I’ve never forgotten. ‘If you ever kill somebody, if you’re guilty as sin, the man to call is Martin H. Ehrengraf.’”

“Indeed,” said Ehrengraf, and sighed a small sigh. “It pains me to hear you say that,” he said, “because it could not be further from the truth. My role, Ms. Plumley, is that of defender of the innocent. I have never represented a guilty client.”

Her face, already jailhouse pale, nevertheless managed to lose color. “Then I’ve made a mistake,” she said.

“Not at all.”

“Because if you only represent innocent people—”

“As indeed I do.”

“—then you can’t represent me, can you?”

“Why ever not?”

“Because I’m guilty. Why are you shaking your head?”

“Because I don’t agree. Ms. Plumley, my dear Ms. Plumley, I know you to be innocent.”

“Innocent,” said Cheryl Plumley. “I just learned how much I want to believe that. When you said what you said, when I heard those words, a surge of emotion shot through me. And now I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

“If you’re not certain,” Ehrengraf said, “it’s probably best to do neither. I’ll say it again, dear lady. I know you to be innocent.”

“How can you? The whole world knows me to be guilty. And yet—”

“Yes?”

“Even though I did it, even though I fired the pistol that killed those people, I could argue that I wasn’t truly responsible for what happened in that house on Woodbridge Avenue. It wouldn’t make any difference in a court of law, and I’m not sure I really believe it myself. But it’s an argument I could make.”

“Then make it.”

She lowered her eyes, then raised them almost defiantly. “Very well,” she said. “The Devil made me do it.”

“Believe me,” Cheryl Plumley said, “I know how that sounds. You must think I’m barking mad.”

Neither barking nor mad, Ehrengraf thought. But possessed of an interesting turn of mind, certainly, and one which presented possibilities.

“I don’t even believe in the Devil,” she went on. “At least I don’t think I do.”

“Unlike the Deity,” Ehrengraf said, “the Devil doesn’t seem to require that one believe in him. One can but wonder why. But let’s put that question aside for the moment, shall we? And why don’t you tell me what happened?”

“I don’t remember everything. I suppose that’s evidence of guilt in and of itself, wouldn’t you say? My guilty conscience must have erased the memory.”

That struck Ehrengraf as rather more of a stretch than believing in the Devil, or even the Tooth Fairy.

“I don’t know where to begin, Mr. Ehrengraf. I woke up that morning, I prepared my own breakfast, I watched a news program on television. I left my house around ten-thirty and drove to my gym, where I took a yoga class from eleven to twelve. I had lunch with a friend at the Hour Glass, and she told me about a shop on Englewood with a good selection of ceramic tiles imported from Italy. I’ve been thinking about doing some renovation and, well, I thought it would be good to see what they had.”

“So you drove there?”

“I must have.”

“But you don’t remember?”

She shook her head. “I remember leaving the restaurant,” she said, “and I remember getting in my car, and then everything’s just gone.”

“Gone.”

“The slate wiped clean. The next thing I knew—”

“Yes?”

“I was in that house.”

“The Kuhldreyer home.”

“Yes, but I didn’t know it at the time. I must have driven past that house dozens of times, it’s right there on Woodbridge between Starin and Voorhees, but I’d never paid any particular attention to it.”

“And you didn’t know the Kuhldreyers.”

“I knew her in high school. Knew who she was, anyway. I don’t think we ever had an actual conversation.”

“Mrs. Kuhldreyer.”

“Not at the time. She was Mary Beth Dooley, and she was two years behind me at Bennett, and she giggled.”

“She giggled.”

“A lot of girls do,” she said, “at that age. That’s about as much as I ever knew about her, and then all of a sudden I was in her house, and I had a gun in my hand.” She looked at her hand, as if it still held the weapon. “It was very heavy,” she said.

“The gun.”

“Yes. It was in my hand, and my finger was on the trigger, and they were all dead.”

“And did you know who they were?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t recognize her,” she said. “Mary Beth. I barely knew her in high school and hadn’t seen her since. And I’d never met him.”

“Richard Kuhldreyer.”

“He was lying on the rug in front of the fireplace,” she said. “I guess he was standing when I shot him, and he fell down there. She was on the sofa, it was one of those Victorian love seats, and I’d shot her once in the face and once in the chest. And then there was another woman.”

“Patricia Munk.”

“Another person I’d never heard of until I killed her with a single shot to the head. She lived across the street from the Kuhldreyers, and I don’t know what she was doing at their house that afternoon.”

Keeping an appointment in Samarra, Ehrengraf supposed.

“Before the event,” he said, “the last thing you remember is getting in your car.”

“Yes.”

“And then the next thing you recall—”

“Is standing in their living room with a gun in my hand.”

“A gun which you’d already fired.”

“Yes, although I have no recollection of firing it.”

“And the people in the room—”

“Are lying there dead. I’m seeing them for the first time, and they’re dead, because I’ve killed them.”

“By pointing the gun in your hand and pulling the trigger, but you don’t remember so doing.”

“No, but who else could have done it? I was all alone in the room. Except for three people who could hardly have done it, because they were all dead.”

Ehrengraf thought it over, and made a little tent of his fingers. Or might it better be a church? He extended both index fingers, interlaced the others. Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the doors and see all the people—

“Lunch,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You had lunch,” he said. “At the Hour Glass, with a friend.”

“Yes.”

“What did you have to eat?”

“What did I have to eat? Why on earth is that important?”

“What might be important,” he said, “is your recollection of it.”

“Fish,” she said. “Filet of sole almandine. With a green salad. I had the house dressing on the salad.”

“And your companion,” Ehrengraf said.

“I don’t remember what she had. Maybe if I concentrate—”

“I don’t care what she had. Tell me about her.”

“Hypnotized,” Cheryl Plumley said.

Ehrengraf marked his place in a book of Swinburne’s verse and regarded his client, who sat in the red leather chair to the side of his chronically untidy desk. At their initial meeting the little lawyer had sensed the beauty damped down by imprisonment. Now, her anxiety dispelled with the restoration of her freedom, the woman positively glowed.

“Barring Satanic intervention,” Ehrengraf said, “no other explanation came to mind. You had acted in an uncharacteristic manner, taking the lives of a man and two women, for no discernible reason, and with no recollection of having done so. What more obvious explanation than that you had been hypnotized?”

“By Maureen McClintock.”

“The woman with whom you’d lunched at the Hour Glass. Not a close friend, merely a casual acquaintance — and yet after an hour in her company, you’d returned abruptly to consciousness in a strange house with a smoking gun in your hand.”

“I thought I must have fired it. And killed those people.”

“A natural conclusion, to be sure. There you were, after all, gun in hand. And there they were, shot dead. Hypnosis, as I understand it, can’t lead one to commit an act against one’s nature. I could not hypnotize you and compel you to beat your infant son to death with a tire iron.”

“I don’t have a son.”

“Or a tire iron, Ms. Plumley, but that’s neither here nor there. Supposing you had both, hypnosis would not lead you to use one upon the other. But if you were encouraged to believe that the tire iron was in fact a fly swatter, and the child a pesky mosquito—”

“Oh. And that’s what happened in the house on Woodbridge Avenue?”

Ehrengraf shook his head. “Not at all,” he said. “They never gave you a paraffin test.”

“A paraffin test?”

“To detect nitrate particles on your skin, a natural consequence of firing a gun. It’s routinely performed in such cases, when someone is suspected of firing a gun, but they didn’t bother in your case because it seemed superfluous. There you were with the gun in your hand, and they assumed you’d fired it, and you didn’t deny it.”

“Because I didn’t remember.” She brightened. “But if they didn’t do the test, that meant I didn’t fire the gun!”

It meant no such thing, Ehrengraf knew, but he let it go.

“If you didn’t,” he said, “then someone else did. And even if you had in fact gunned those people down, you could only have done so under the impression that they were flies and the handgun was a fly swatter.”

“How could I think—”

“Oh, not literally,” he said, and fingered the knot in his tie. It was his Caedmon Society necktie, his usual choice for moments of triumph, and was this not a triumphant occasion? Had he not once again snatched an innocent client from the jaws of what the media persistently called the criminal justice system?

“But—”

“Perhaps the suggestion implanted under hypnosis was that you were playing a violent video game, and that Patricia Munk and the Kuhldreyers were images on an Xbox screen; by zapping them with your ray gun, you’d advance to the next level of the game.”

“I’ve never played a video game.”

“Nor did you play this one,” Ehrengraf said smoothly, “because in fact you didn’t shoot anyone. It was Maureen McClintock who did the shooting, then pressed the gun into your hand and slipped out the door. Perhaps she told you that you’d wake up when you heard a doorbell, and rang it just before getting into her car and driving away. You heard it, you returned to full consciousness, and what else were you to believe but that you’d caused the mayhem before you?”

“So you were right, Mr. Ehrengraf. I really was innocent. But the police—”

“Did everything one might have hoped for, once they were steered in the right direction. They’d never had reason to take a good look at Maureen McClintock, whose connection to the matter seemed limited to her having shared a table with you earlier. But once they did, they found no end of evidence to implicate her and exonerate you.”

“She’d studied hypnotism.”

“She owned over a dozen books on the subject,” he said, “all of them well-thumbed, along with a fifteen-lesson correspondence course. And they weren’t out on display where anyone might have noticed them. They were tucked away out of sight, as if she didn’t want anyone to know of her interest in the subject.”

“Which she denied, according to the papers.”

“Stoutly,” said Ehrengraf. “Maintained she’d never seen them before in her life.”

“Then how did she explain them?”

“She couldn’t. She also maintained she’d never had any contact with the Kuhldreyers, or with Patricia Munk. And yet there was a newspaper clipping, news of a promotion Mr. Kuhldreyer had received. And a photograph of the couple, and a rather startling letter from Patricia Munk.”

“I read as much in the paper. But they didn’t go into detail.”

“They couldn’t,” Ehrengraf said. “It was quite graphic in nature. Evidently Munk and McClintock had had an affair, and Munk wrote about it at some length, and in some detail. You couldn’t reproduce it in a family newspaper.”

“I didn’t know Maureen well,” Cheryl Plumley said, “but I had no idea she was gay.”

“Something else she denies, but her denial is severely compromised, not only by Munk’s letter to her but by several letters she seems to have written to Munk, found in a hat box in the dead woman’s closet. Of course she swears she never wrote those letters. Oh, it’s a sad case indeed, Ms. Plumley. What did she have against the Kuhldreyers? Was it some sort of love triangle, or quadrangle? And why choose you as a cat’s-paw for her adventure in triple homicide?”

“So many questions, Mr. Ehrengraf, and I can’t answer any of them. But I’ll have to, won’t I?”

“Oh?”

“For the book.”

“Ah, the book,” said Ehrengraf, and drew a document of several pages from a manila folder. “I’ve looked this over, Ms. Plumley, and I believe it’s ready for your signature. The publisher has agreed to improve his terms, and they’re now quite generous. You’ll work with an accomplished author, a very talented and personable young woman named Nan Fassbinder, and I’ll vet the final document to make sure the words she puts in your mouth are acceptable. Now if you could sign your name here, Cheryl Jonellen Plumley, that’s right, and here, and here as well. And now you’ll be able to tell your story to the world.”

“The part I remember,” she said, “which isn’t very much at all, but the wonderful part is that now I’ll be able to pay your fee. I was worried about that, you know, but you told me not to worry, and I had a thought that, well, it seems embarrassing now. I don’t know if I should mention it.”

In Ehrengraf’s experience, a mere pause was often all it took to prompt a fuller explanation. Such was the case now.

“What struck me on our first meeting,” Cheryl Plumley said, “was what an attractive man you are. When you told me I was innocent, I quivered with a sensation that was more than mere relief. And then, when you rescued me from what looked to be an absolutely hopeless situation, I was overcome by the desire to express my gratitude in, um—”

“Physical form?”

“Yes. But to do so when I was unable to pay your fee, well, that wouldn’t be proper, would it? It would look as though, well, you know how it would look.”

“Yes.”

“But now, with the book deal taking care of your compensation, and, oh, this is so awkward, Mr. Ehrengraf, but—”

“My dear Ms. Plumley,” Ehrengraf said, and took her hand, and brushed it with his lips. What a sweet little hand it was, so soft, with tapering fingers. “I do believe,” he said, “that we’d be more comfortable on the sofa.”

Ehrengraf had just finished knotting his Caedmon Society necktie when his client returned from the lavatory. She was nicely dressed once again, after having been ever so nicely undressed. He looked at her, and his gaze brought a blush to her cheeks even as it put a smile on her lips.

“I feel quite wonderful,” she said. “Everything’s worked out perfectly, hasn’t it?”

“It has.”

“For everyone but Maureen McClintock,” Cheryl Plumley said. “I don’t suppose I should sympathize with her, after what she did to those people and what she tried to do to me. But I was locked up myself until very recently, and I know how awful that is.”

“Indeed.”

“And while I never knew her terribly well, she always seemed like such a nice person. I ask myself how she could have done what she did, and the answer that pops into my head — well, you’ll just think it’s silly.”

“Oh?”

“Maybe the Devil made her do it,” she said. “But that’s perfectly ridiculous, isn’t it?”

“Perfectly ridiculous,” said Maureen McClintock. “As I didn’t do any of the things with which I’m charged, there’s nothing for the Devil to have made me do.”

“I know,” Ehrengraf said.

“I’m supposed to be the worst woman since Lucrezia Borgia,” she said, “with the possible exception of that woman who drowned her two little boys, and she at least was clearly demented. Is that how you propose to save me? Because I’m not crazy.”

“I know.”

“Though how can I be sure? ‘I’m not crazy’ is, after all, one of the things crazy people say. And what’s the point of saying it? The people who already know you’re sane don’t require reassurance, and the others won’t find your proclamation convincing.” She frowned. “One can almost see the Devil’s hand in it, can’t one? Because the whole affair is truly diabolical. All the evidence in the world points to my guilt as a multiple murderess. And yet I’m innocent.”

“I know.”

She looked at him, as if seeing him for the first time. Ehrengraf, his usual natty self in a gray flannel suit, a French blue shirt, and a navy tie, took the opportunity to look at his new client, and liked what he saw. Her drab outfit notwithstanding, she was a fine-looking woman, and he could see strength and purpose in her facial features.

His recent experience in his office provided him with an interesting image — Maureen McClintock, divested of her garments, stretched out upon his brown leather sofa.

All in due time, he told himself.

“‘I know,’” she echoed him. “You keep saying that, Mr. Ehrengraf.”

“I suppose I do.”

“I said I was innocent, and you said, ‘I know.’”

“I did.”

“Were you acknowledging my remark? As if nodding to keep the conversation moving?”

He shook his head. “I was acknowledging your innocence. Because I know you didn’t kill anybody, my dear Ms. McClintock, nor did you persuade anyone else to do so, through hypnotism or another of the dark arts. You were artfully — one might even say diabolically — framed, by someone whose intent was to commit murder and get away with it.”

“Cheryl Plumley.”

“Certainly not,” said Ehrengraf. “Ms. Plumley was my client.”

“But—”

“And my clients are innocent, Ms. McClintock. I did not endure the tedium of law school or brave the rigors of the bar exam in order to serve as cup bearer to the guilty. I represent — gladly, proudly — the innocent.”

“You’re saying that Cheryl and I are both innocent.”

“I am.”

“And someone else—”

“Framed you both, so arranging matters that Ms. Plumley appeared to have committed the murder while you appeared to have hovered in the background pulling the strings. Those books on hypnotism, Ms. McClintock. Did you buy them? Study them in detail?”

“I never even laid eyes on them,” she said, “until the police searched my home and pointed them out to me.” She frowned at a memory. “I was hypnotized once,” she remembered, “if that’s what it was. I wanted to lose a few pounds, and a friend had gone to a hypnotherapist, and she said it helped. So I went, and I guess he hypnotized me, but I can’t say I felt any different afterward. I picked up a pint of ice cream on the way home.”

“So it didn’t work.”

“Well, maybe it did,” she said, “because two weeks later I joined a gym and booked sessions with a personal trainer, and that worked. Maybe that man put me in a trance and told me to join a gym.” She straightened in her chair. “I didn’t buy those books, I didn’t hypnotize Cheryl, I didn’t do any of those things.”

“You don’t have to tell me that, Ms. McClintock.”

“But how can you prove it in court?”

“I am rarely called upon to prove anything in court, Ms. McClintock. I find courtrooms airless and joyless venues, and make a point of staying out of them. What I intend to do, my dear woman, is so arrange matters that the facts of the case become known. When that happens, the innocence which is now so obvious to me will become evident to one and all.”

And toward that end, he told her, he’d need to know something about her life and the people in it.

“Whitley Pleskow,” Maureen McClintock said, on their next meeting. “Why, I can barely picture what he looks like. It’s been years since I saw him, and our relationship never amounted to much of anything. I’m not even sure you can call it a relationship. We had a couple of dates, and I should have ended it at that point because I knew the chemistry wasn’t there.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No, and the next time I saw him I went to bed with him, and that confirmed what I’d already realized.”

“The lack of chemistry.”

“And when it’s not there, it’s never going to be there, is it? But that’s not knowledge one is born with. You have to learn it, and Whit was part of my education. I saw him a few more times, and we went to bed, and I guess he liked it enough to want to keep on seeing me, but I didn’t.”

“And you broke it off.”

“In a pleasant and painless way,” she said, “or at least that’s what I always thought. But I guess it wasn’t that pleasant or painless for him.”

Ehrengraf fingered the knot in his Caedmon Society necktie. “Swinburne,” he said.

“Swinburne?”

“The Nineteenth Century British poet, Ms. McClintock. ‘One love grows green when one turns grey.’ But it seems to have been Mr. Pleskow who turned green.”

“With jealousy?”

“Or envy,” he said, “or something of the sort. To all appearances, Mr. Pleskow went on with his life. He dated other women, and eventually he married one of them. The marriage failed, and again he went on with his life. And yet, throughout it all, he remained fixated on one woman. And that would be you, Ms. McClintock.”

She shuddered. “It seems impossible,” she said. “And yet I saw that photograph.”

“The little shrine. Photographs of you, and newspaper clippings. A little altar, on which he’d burned black candles.”

“What does it mean, burning a black candle?”

“It can’t mean anything good,” Ehrengraf said. “He was entirely obsessed with you. The police found notebooks filled with letters he wrote to you but never sent. They found little stories of his. Fantasies, really, in which you were a principal player.”

“I read about them.”

“But the press couldn’t reproduce them, because they were relentlessly obscene. And violent as well — in some of his writings you were abused and tortured and murdered, while in others you were the villain, having your way with men or women and dispatching them horribly once you were done with them.”

“How awful.”

“In one particularly inventive episode,” Ehrengraf recalled, “you and Cheryl Plumley were lesbian lovers, and the two of you impaled a young woman upon a sharpened stake and made love while she slowly bled to death. Your victim is referred to only as Patsy, but her description is that of poor Patricia Munk.”

“I never had any idea. I’d forgotten him, and I assumed he’d forgotten me. It’s harrowing to think I could have played that sort of unwitting role in his personal mythology.” She drew a breath. “I guess we’ll never know how he managed to do what he did. Putting Cheryl in the Kuhldreyer house, planting incriminating material in my home. It’s amazing he worked it all out, let alone carried it off.”

“It’s unfortunate,” Ehrengraf said, “that he’s not able to give an account of his actions. It pains me to say it, but I blame myself.”

“You? But why, Mr. Ehrengraf?”

“When my investigations began to bear fruit,” he said, “I should have gone straight to the police. But one hesitates to do so while the possibility of innocence still exists. And so I’m afraid I had a conversation with Mr. Pleskow. I hoped to secure information without divulging any myself, but I fear I left him aware that he was under suspicion. And thus, after I left him—”

“He took the easy way out.”

Easy, thought Ehrengraf, may not have been the most appropriate word for Whitley Pleskow’s fitful little dance at the end of a rope. But he let it go.

“In a sense,” Ehrengraf said, “he may be said to have done us a favor. Some unscrupulous defense attorney could have turned the courtroom into a circus arena. Why, for all we know Pleskow could have fabricated an alibi, could have chipped away at the mountain of evidence against him. But his final act, bolstered by a suicide note in his own hand, removes all doubt. While we may now know precisely how he brought it off, we know that the triple homicide on Woodbridge Avenue was his work and his work alone. Cheryl Plumley is entirely innocent. And so, my dear Ms. McClintock, are you.”

Her hand fastened on his arm. “Mr. Ehrengraf,” she said, not quite purring. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

Ehrengraf, waiting for his client to return from the lavatory, tried to remember what he’d paid for the leather sofa. Whatever the price, it had been money well spent. And it seemed to him that the piece of furniture improved with use, as if it were seasoned like a fine meerschaum pipe by the sport conducted upon it.

“That was lovely,” Maureen McClintock said upon her return. “But I still owe you a fee, and I’m sure it must be a substantial one, because you deserve no less.”

Ehrengraf named a figure.

The woman’s face fell. “It’s about what I expected,” she said, “and I’d write a check for the full amount, and even tag on a bonus. But—”

“But you’re in no position to do so.”

“I’m solvent,” she said, “and I’ve always been able to meet my expenses. But I’ve never been able to put money aside, and I don’t have any reserves to draw upon.”

“Ah,” said Ehrengraf. “My dear Ms. McClintock, you have an asset of which you may not be aware.”

“Oh?”

“You have a story, Ms. McClintock. A very valuable story. And I’m acquainted with a woman who can help you share it with the world.”

Nan Fassbinder sat back in the red leather chair and crossed her long legs at the ankle. “I’ve never been involved in anything like this,” she said. “I’ve hunted for le mot juste, and the best I can come up with is fandango.”

“Isn’t that a dance?”

“A Spanish dance,” she said. “Figuratively, it has several meanings. According to Wikipedia, where I looked it up just hours ago, it may mean a quarrel, a big fuss, or a brilliant exploit.”

“And when you use it now—”

“A brilliant exploit, of course. I’m in awe.”

“Well,” said Ehrengraf.

“I’m also hugely grateful,” she said. “I have to thank you for Cheryl Plumley and Maureen McClintock. The publisher’s over the moon, you know. Two women, both of them wonderfully articulate and deliciously attractive, and each with a gripping story to tell. And of course the two stories reinforce one another, and anyone who reads one of the books is impelled to reach for the other.”

“Which can only be good for all concerned.”

“Good for the publisher, who’ll sell a ton of books. Good for Cheryl and Maureen, both of whom are getting media coaching even as we speak. They’re competitive, but in a good way, and they can’t wait to chase separately around the country on their book tours, with a few joint appearances in major cities as a highlight.”

“I suspect they’ll be good at it.”

“No kidding,” Nan Fassbinder said. “So it’ll be good for them, and I guess it’ll be good for you, because the advances they got enabled them to pay for your services.”

“Almost beside the point,” Ehrengraf said. “Still, one does like to be adequately compensated for one’s efforts.”

“And good for me, Martin. May I call you Martin?”

“Of course, my dear Nan.”

“Good for me, because I’ll do very well as the co-author of both of these books, and if they’re as successful as I think they’ll be, it’ll boost my stock for future projects. You might say I owe you a debt of gratitude, Martin.”

“No more than the one I owe you, Nan.”

“Hmmm,” she said. “You know, both of those women speak very highly of you, Martin. And I got the definite impression that it was more than your legal acumen that they appreciated.”

“Oh?”

“That sofa,” Nan Fassbinder said. “Can it possibly be as comfortable as it looks?”