The Eighth Circle

by Stanley Ellin

  “Except for one thing,” Murray said blandly. “The woman under discussion happens to be a hot-looking redhead about twenty years old, and her figure—well, to put it in nice language, she is extremely well endowed. LoScalzo will know the score as soon as he takes one look at her. He is going to kick that cup of coffee right out of her hand.”

  Watching Harlingen digest this information, Murray was surprised at the degree of his own honest sympathy for the man. And still, he wondered, what was wrong in feeling that way? Harlingen was, by any standards, a decent person. From the evidence, he was a good husband, a good father, and a good friend. And he had guts, too. He could have spent a soft life as a well-kept office cat, but at his age he had thrown that over and gone out to roam strange alleys and to battle tougher and smarter cats who knew the terrain from the start. A foolish decision, true. A decision that reeked of the genteel dogoodism, of the compulsive idealism that now and then infected people of Harlingen’s class and type. A decision finally triggered by a forty-dollar-an-hour psychoanalyst who knew he had to deliver something for his fee. And yet it took guts. Within certain limits you couldn’t help liking a man with that kind of spirit. And there was no law on the books that barred a Ralph Harlingen from growing up eventually and exercising common sense to match the spirit.

  Murray considered this, and then said to Harlingen, “Do you mind my asking you a personal question?”

  Harlingen smiled. “Well, when somebody starts off with that question I usually find out later that I do mind. That’s just a joke, really. What did you want to know?”

  “Oh, whether you’ve changed your mind about Lundeen, at all. I mean, about his being a nice, clean-cut, innocent cop who’s been framed by a pair of villains for some unknown reason.”

  “No, I have not,” Harlingen said. He was clearly nettled. “And from that somewhat sardonic tone I take it that you haven’t changed your mind either. That surprises me. It really does.”

  “Why should it?”

  “Why? Because of the evidence you yourself went out and got. This evidence,” said Harlingen, slapping a hand down on the papers before him. “All right, I grant it proves Arnold was a fool. Perhaps a little more than a fool. But by the same token it happens to prove that he is not guilty of perjury. I don’t see how you can dispute that.”

  “Oh, but I can. And do.”

  “I still don’t see how,” Harlingen said stubbornly. “The girl’s story alone—”

  “—takes care of about twenty minutes. It does not take care of one minute before or after that.”

  “But Lundeen was with Floyd the rest of the time. You heard Floyd say that yourself.”

  “Yes,” said Murray, “I did. And whether he’s been splitting the graft with Lundeen or is just a real good pal I don’t know, but he was lying like an old master. Not that I don’t give the boy credit. Baby face and all, he isn’t going to change that story for anybody. Not you, not LoScalzo, and not the Recording Angel either. He’ll stick with it to the end, and it won’t bother him one bit. You don’t make the grade with the Vice Squad, and pal with a guy like Lundeen, and let little things like graft and perjury bother you any.”

  Harlingen opened his mouth to say something, and then closed it. He sat rubbing his hand slowly back and forth over his close-cropped hair in abstraction. “No,” he said at last, “I don’t believe it.”

  It was the way he said it that pulled Murray up short. The flat finality of it. The notice that the evidence had been reviewed and was politely rejected. It gave Murray the feeling of having run headlong into a hard object he hadn’t known was there; and that, as he told himself, was a strange feeling to have evoked in you by someone like Ralph Harlingen.

  “All right, then you don’t believe it,” Murray said. “But LoScalzo does, and he’s going to bang away at it at the trial until he’s got the jury believing it, too. That’s what they pay off on in your line of work.”

  Harlingen did not seem disturbed by this, either. “I know what you mean,” he said. “I’ve been seeing quite a bit of LoScalzo during the past week.”

  “You have? Where?”

  “In court. I’ve been sitting in a back row as an observer at this trial he’s working now.” Harlingen shook his head admiringly. “He’s a good man.”

  “Worried about that?”

  “No, the funny thing is that I’m not.” Harlingen laughed shortly. “Maybe it sounds like the most godawful conceit, but I’m sure I have what it takes to make a good trial lawyer. I can think on my feet, I can speak well, I can really hit hard if I have something to hit with. I mean, I’m not just saying this. Of course, I’ve only tried a few small civil suits, but I was good at it. My father once admitted as much, and I suppose you know how he was about doling out compliments. Or is this turning your stomach? I warned you it would sound like godawful conceit.”

  “No,” said Murray, “a little of that can be a big help to a lawyer. Fact is, the one thing I couldn’t handle in law school was public speaking. Only reason it didn’t bother me too much at the time was that I pictured myself winding up ultimately as the brains behind somebody else’s mellow voice. Made a nice picture, too, until reality set in.”

  “I never knew you studied law,” Harlingen said with surprise. “Where was that?”

  “Oh, St. John’s, in Brooklyn. One jump across the bridge.”

  Harlingen nodded gravely. “Well,” he remarked with an air of knowing what was expected of him, “they’ve turned out some good men there.”

  Murray was wickedly tempted to ask him to name a few, but restrained himself. “Let’s back up to Lundeen again,” he said. “Have you seen him lately?”

  “Yes, he was at the house Sunday morning. We worked out a list of people who might testify as character witnesses.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, one’s an old friend of his who’s now doing very well in real estate. Very much the sort to impress a blue-ribbon jury.”

  “Might be. Who else is there?”

  “Quite a few. A minister and several church vestrymen. And there’s a policeman who was on the beat with Arnold when he was in uniform. He was there when Arnold captured an armed bandit and won a citation. Did you know he had won a citation?”

  “No. And I don’t know if that’s admissible in this case. Is it?”

  “It may not be. Even so, I want to get the fact before the jury. It doesn’t matter if it’s struck from the record later, as long as the jury’s heard about it.”

  “It’s worth a try,” said Murray. “Is that the list?”

  “No, the last one is Arnold’s old high-school principal. A Dr. Charles Fuller down at Greenwich High. I spoke to him on the phone yesterday, and he remembered Arnold very well. It seems that there had been some sort of incident at the school—hoodlums attacking a student, or something like that—and if Arnold hadn’t come along in the nick of time it might have wound up pretty tragically. It isn’t always—”

  Murray felt every nerve tighten. “That kid who was attacked,” he said casually. “You didn’t get his name by any chance, did you?”

  “No, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is the testimony itself, especially coming from a man like Fuller But, as I was saying, it isn’t always easy to get someone like that on the stand. He might be talked into it, but I’m not sure.”

  “Tell you what,” Murray said abruptly. “I’d like to take a crack at him myself this afternoon. I have to be down in that neighborhood anyhow,” he added to forestall any objections. “It won’t be any bother.”

  He said very little more during the remainder of the discussion, and what he thought, while Harlingen meandered along his loquacious way, was largely unprintable. Most of it concerned lawyers who had only one case to handle, thus having all the time they needed to talk a man to death about it, as if it mattered a damn to him.

  Dr. Fuller was an elderly man, not long before retirement, with oysterlike pouches under his eyes, and a few hairs carefully drawn
across his otherwise naked scalp like the strings of a violin. When he spoke, it was in measured accents, his voice the complacent rumble of a kindly sage offering enlightenment to the peasants.

  Yes, he assured Murray, he remembered Arnold very well. Not an exemplary scholar, perhaps, but certainly an outstanding student. A fine athlete. A natural leader. Few others in the school’s history had ever won the honor of being elected president of the Student Council for two successive terms. A remarkable achievement, especially for a boy who came from the home Arnold did. Drunken, abusive parents who never helped the boy an inch of the way. No background at all. It was a sad day when people like that—

  Murray shifted in his chair. “There was some sort of incident, wasn’t there?” he prompted. “I think Mr. Harlingen mentioned an attack on a student—”

  Ah, yes. That had been an atrocious affair. The student in charge of the supply room in the basement had gone down to lock it at the final bell when two young hoodlums who had been ransacking it seized her and dragged her inside. There was no question about their intentions. They were simply brute, unreasoning animals. If Arnold had not heard the girl scream, and, at considerable risk to himself, driven them off, it would have been an absolute tragedy.

  “Do you remember her name?” Murray asked.

  Yes, as it happened, Dr. Fuller did remember the girl’s name. But he was not at liberty to divulge it. Both the police and the child’s parents had impressed that on him very strenuously. Very strenuously indeed. That was entirely understandable, of course. The girl was entitled to protection from the tabloids and from neighborhood talk. It was to everyone’s credit that the affair had been handled so discreetly. It would have been outrageous if the school’s reputation had been blackened by an affair like this for which it was in no way responsible. Why, the girl herself—

  A few blocks away, on Eighth Street, Murray found a bar with comparatively well-lit booths. He spread his street map out on a table in a far corner, anchored it with a bottle of beer, and studied it carefully. Then he folded the map and went to the telephone.

  Victory Hospital was the nearest, but, it briskly informed him, it had no ambulance service. “St. Alonsus takes most of the ambulance calls around here,” the girl at the switchboard said. “Anyhow, if you need an ambulance, mister, you ought to call the police. They’ll take care of it for you right away.”

  St. Alonsus was more helpful. Yes, it had operated an ambulance service ten or twelve years ago. In fact, it had operated an ambulance service fifty years ago. Records? Well, the one to see was Sister Angelica at the reception desk. She’d know all about it.

  The craggy-faced nun at the reception desk found time between incessant phone calls to shake her head regretfully at Murray. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but before I show any medical records to you I must have the superintendent’s permission. And he’s not here now.”

  “I’m not interested in medical records, Sister. All I want to see are some ambulance drivers’ reports from around that time. Aren’t they kept separately?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, they are. I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. Sister Maria Gloria may be able to help you find what you want. She’s in charge of our old records.”

  Sister Maria Gloria was a diminutive Chinese woman with a shy smile and eyes that shone with earnest helpfulness behind a pair of old-fashioned steel-rimmed spectacles. She listened to Murray with concern, and then guided him down a long corridor, her skirts whispering plaintively over the waxed floor. When she threw open the door of a dingy storeroom a reason for the concern became immediately apparent.

  The room was a shambles of records, an Old Curiosity Shop of records. Bound volumes of them of every size and shape crowded wall shelves to the ceiling. Bundles of them tied with cord towered high in shaky columns. Stacks of them were piled on a window sill. And each rung of a ladder in the middle of the room was decorated with an individual volume.

  “Of course, these are old records,” Sister Maria Gloria hastily explained, as if to point out that even in a well-run hospital one cannot expect efficiency to extend to the darkest corners. “Some of them are very old. A hundred years old. If you touch the paper it breaks apart. We do not want that to happen, so we must be very careful.”

  “The ones I want,” Murray said, “are the ambulance-call reports from around ten years ago. Do you think you can find them?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Sister Maria Gloria, and looked around at the shelves doubtfully, “but it will take a little time.”

  It took two hours of tedious search, and long before then Sister Maria Gloria’s wimple was gray with dust from the shelves, and her nose badly smudged.

  “There is this thing,” she said, as she finally stacked the desired volumes on the top rung of the ladder which had been cleared for the purpose, “this microfilm. Do you know about it?”

  “Yes,” said Murray.

  “It is wonderful,” said Sister Maria Gloria fervently. “All these books, and you could hold them in one hand like this.” She held out a small hand with fist clenched to show him.

  Murray laughed. “Well, maybe a little more than that, Sister.”

  Sister Maria Gloria looked shamefaced. “Yes, it would take more than that. I was exaggerating. But it is wonderful. And,” she sighed, “it does cost so very much.”

  She stood out of the way in a corner telling her beads while he painstakingly went over each entry in the first book. The second book went faster; it included the months of July and August, which he could skip entirely. And then in the third book his finger, slowly moving down a page, was transfixed by the entry he had known all along must be there.

  Emergency receiving 4:05 p.m., it read. Ruth L. Vincent—white-female—fr Greenwich H.S.

  Written in a careless scrawl. Written probably by some tired intern or driver who had seen too many of these things to care much, one way or the other. But written there, nevertheless, for Murray Kirk to find when the time came.

  He turned to Sister Maria Gloria, and she put away her rosary and took the book from his hand. “You have found what you were looking for?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Murray. “I found what I was looking for.”

  “How very nice,” she said, glowing. “I prayed that you would.”

  “And I prayed you would, too,” he said solemnly, and smiled at her bewilderment. “No, I’m not teasing you, Sister. In my office there happens to be the finest microfilm outfit you can imagine, and a high-priced photographer who’s always glad to find a use for it. You bring these books to him, a few at a time, and you’ll make him a very happy man. He’ll do your work free of charge.”

  “Oh, no!” said Sister Maria Gloria aghast.

  “Don’t you want to be able to hold all these books in one hand?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Sister Maria Gloria weakly. “But it is like paying me for what I do here. You must not pay me for that.”

  “I see. Then would it be all right if I offered this as a gift to the hospital itself?”

  From the dawning light of wonder behind those spectacles, he knew it would.

  14

  He had completely forgotten his good intentions of clearing up office detail on Friday, but Mrs. Knapp had not. No sooner had he taken off his hat and coat than she appeared, tight-lipped and forbidding, a grim priestess bearing votive offerings to the gods of efficiency. In her arms was the basket of unanswered mail, unsigned contracts, and unread reports. Close in her wake came Gene Rigaud, drafted from his labors on the executive files to transport the Dictaphone machine.

  “And,” stated Mrs. Knapp before departing, “there isn’t one single appointment on your pad for the whole day. I told Miss Whiteside to make sure of that.”

  Faced with the inescapable, Murray went to work, but by noon found himself struggling futilely against a mounting restlessness. Finally he went to the window to watch the crowds in the street below. They didn’t offer much of a spectacle—the bleak gray of the sky made everything in s
ight seem lackluster—but they were certainly better to look at than the tedious litter of papers on his desk.

  The trouble was, he reflected, that Conmy-Kirk was now past the point where it could be handled as a one-man operation. Of course, much of that was his own doing. Once he had understood the depth of Frank’s lonely need for him—Bruno had opened his eyes to it the day he told Murray that it was like money in the bank—he had argued endlessly and vehemently in favor of expanding the agency to the absolute limit. Did it make any difference that there had been more to the argument than an interest in piling up money for Frank? That he knew Frank would have to lean more and more heavily on him as the agency expanded, until a full partnership was inevitable? Not at all. It had been fair exchange, and Frank would have been the first to say so.

  As a matter of fact, what he needed now was someone to walk in and serve him as lieutenant half as well as he had served Frank in his time. But where could you find that someone? The more you considered the possible candidates the more you realized that Scott, despite his brutal self-assurance and his crackbrained worship of the spinal column, had come uncomfortably close to the bull’s-eye with his remark about loyalty. Bruno was the likeliest candidate, but he was much too close to Jack Collins. Gene Rigaud, young, smart, and hungry—he could be another Murray Kirk in the making—was already too close to Bruno. Burke, the retired police captain who was running the payroll-guard service in fine style, seemed to be too close to half the cops in the city, and was also a little bit too hard-boiled and smart for his own good.

  Murray smiled at the thought of someone like Ralph Harlingen taking the job, and was suddenly reminded that he had not yet reported to Harlingen on his interview at the high school. He had the call put through, and, after he explained matters on the phone, was pleased to note that Harlingen accepted the unfavorable verdict on Fuller without demur.