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me a fee of ninety thousand dollars. The fee will be all inclusive. Any expenses will be mine to bear. Should I fail to secure your release you will owe me nothing.”
    “But—”
    “Is that agreeable, sir?”
    “But what are you going to do? Engage detectives? File an appeal? Try to get the case reopened?”
    “When a man engages to save your life, Mr. Beale, do you require that he first outline his plans for you?”
    “No, but—”
    “Ninety thousand dollars. Payable if I succeed. Are the terms agreeable?”
    “Yes, but—”
    “Mr. Beale, when next we meet you will owe me ninety thousand dollars plus whatever emotional gratitude comes naturally to you. Until then, sir, you owe me one dollar.” The thin lips curled in a shadowy smile. ‘The cut worm forgives the plow,’ Mr. Beale. William Blake,
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
. ‘The cut worm forgives the plow.’ You might think about that, sir, until we meet again.”
     
    T he second meeting of Martin Ehrengraf and Grantham Beale took place five weeks and four days later. On this occasion the little lawyer wore a navy two-button suit with a subtle vertical stripe. His shoes were highly polished black wing tips, his shirt a pale blue broadcloth with contrasting white collar and cuffs. His necktie bore a half-inch wide stripe of royal blue flanked by two narrower stripes, one gold and the other a rather bright green, all on a navy field.
    And this time Ehrengraf’s client was also rather nicely turned out, although his tweed jacket and flannels were hardly a match for the lawyer’s suit. But Beale’s dress was a great improvement over the shapeless gray prison garb he had worn previously, just as his office—a room filled with jumbled books and boxes, a desk covered with books and albums and stamps in and out of glassine envelopes, two worn leather chairs, and a matching sagging sofa—just as all of this comfortable disarray was a vast improvement over the prison cell which had been the site of their earlier meeting.
    Beale, seated behind his desk, gazed thoughtfully at Ehrengraf, who stood ramrod straight, one hand on the desk top, the other at his side. “Ninety thousand dollars,” Beale said levelly. “You must admit that’s a bit rich, Mr. Ehrengraf.”
    “We agreed on the price.”
    “No argument. We did agree, and I’m a firm believer in the sanctity of verbal agreements. But it was my understanding that your fee would be payable if my liberty came about as a result of your efforts.”
    “You are free today.”
    “I am indeed, and I’ll be free tomorrow, but I can’t see how it was any of your doing.”
    “Ah,” Ehrengraf said. His face bore an expression of infinite disappointment, a disappointment felt not so much with this particular client as with the entire human race. “You feel I did nothing for you.”
    “I wouldn’t say that. Perhaps you were taking steps to file an appeal. Perhaps you engaged detectives or did some detective work of your own. Perhaps in due course you would have found a way to get me out of prison, but in the meantime the unexpected happened and your services turned out to be unnecessary.”
    “The unexpected happened?”
    “Well, who could have possibly anticipated it?” Beale shook his head in wonder. “Just think of it. Murchison went and got an attack of conscience. The bounder didn’t have enough of a conscience to step forward and admit what he’d done, but he got to wondering what would happen if he died suddenly and I had to go on serving a life sentence for a crime he had committed. He wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize his liberty while he lived but he wanted to be able to make amends if and when he died.”
    “Yes.”
    “So he prepared a letter,” Beale went on. “Typed out a long letter explaining just why he had wanted his partner dead and how the unregistered gun had actually belonged to Speldron in the first place, and how he’d shot him and wrapped the gun in a towel and