The Eighth Circle

by Stanley Ellin

  “Yes,” Harlingen said, “he sounded like an old windbag when I talked to him, too. Of course, that doesn’t always count against a witness, especially someone in Fuller’s position. I have the feeling that no matter how old a man gets, he still finds a high-school principal a pretty imposing object, and that’s what I wanted to hit the jury with here. But you’re probably right. If he’s going to make such a big thing of Arnold’s bad home life as a kid, it could have the wrong effect altogether.”

  “It could,” said Murray. “Also, I gathered that he hasn’t been in touch with Lundeen for quite a while. You don’t need anyone up on the stand rehashing ancient history. Your best bets are people who’ve known Lundeen since he joined the cops.”

  “I know that.” Harlingen sounded a little miffed. “I made that point to Arnold when we prepared the list. Fuller is the only exception on it, and you can see why.”

  “I suppose so,” Murray said. “Oh, by the way, was Ruth there when you and Lundeen discussed Fuller? I mean, when he told you about the time he saved that kid who was being mobbed?”

  “Why, yes. No, wait a second—I don’t believe she was. She must have been off with Dinah somewhere at the time. I remember that, because usually she’s right in the middle of these discussions, but she had very little to say that morning. She seemed very much under the weather emotionally. That’s not surprising, of course. She’s been under almost as much of a strain as he has.”

  “I guess she has,” said Murray, and let it go at that. “Yes, I’ll keep in touch. Have a nice week end.”

  From all the evidence, he told himself jubilantly as he put down the phone, Lundeen is now running scared. He is running very, very scared, indeed. He would never have risked exposing the secret of that high-school episode if he wasn’t. And what must have taken place between him and Ruth when he told her he wanted to do so—

  Murray returned to the pile of papers before him almost light-heartedly.

  At four-thirty, when he was near the bottom of the pile, Miss White-side came in to announce that someone wanted to see him right away. “I know Mrs. Knapp said you weren’t to be bothered today,” she said worriedly—she had a wary regard for Mrs. Knapp’s injunctions—“but this seems awfully important. It’s somebody from the District Attorney’s office. He says his name is Myron Kramer.”

  It took Murray a moment to recall the name. Then he realized that his caller was Felix LoScalzo’s leg man, and found himself not at all disturbed by the realization. If anything, what he felt for LoScalzo—and he was willing to extend the feeling to LoScalzo’s representative-was a pleasant kinship. For the time being, he was one of them. They were all professionals together; they spoke the same language; and, most intriguing to contemplate, they were gunning for the same bird, each in his own way. That was the case in a nutshell, although it was hardly LoScalzo’s business to know it.

  Kramer was tall and slim, with blazing red hair and a host of freckles on his youthful face. He looked eighteen, and was probably about twenty-eight. Nowadays, Murray knew, every district attorney’s office, every United States Attorney’s office in the city, was loaded with this kind of underling. Young Harlingens all, they had no soft berth with the old man waiting for them. So they piled into prosecutors’ offices where they could fetch and carry until the baby fat they bore from law school was melted off, and were then put to work trying unimportant cases until the legal muscle was built up. In the end, they made good lawyers who knew their way around a courtroom as well as a contract. Kramer, with his youthfully earnest face and shrewd eyes, seemed to be a superior example of the type.

  He also proved to be a young man who did not waste words. Mr. LoScalzo, he said briefly, would be out of court in a few minutes, and looked forward to seeing Mr. Kirk in his office when he got back there. It was important that they have a little talk.

  “About what?” asked Murray.

  “Articles 54 and 70, I think,” Kramer blandly replied.

  Article 70 was that old pitfall for inept private detectives, disorderly conduct, but Article 54 was something else again. “Disorderly conduct and conspiracy,” Murray said. “You sure there’s nothing else on the agenda? Sepulture? Barratry? Dueling? Nothing really fancy?”

  Kramer smiled. “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “After all, I’m just the guy who empties ashtrays around the place.”

  I’ll bet you are, Murray thought as he reached for his hat, you cute little cobra.

  LoScalzo was a big man. Big in height, big in girth, his huge head surmounted by a shock of unkempt white hair, he sat there peeling an apple with a paring knife which circled the fruit in a smooth, continuous motion. The peel, coiling into a plate on the desk, looked as if it were being run out of a machine. Murray recognized the performance as a variation of Bruno’s briefcase act, and a dull one at that. He turned his attention to the rest of the room, and found that the one object of interest there was a glass jar nearly full of water, and with what appeared to be some shapeless wads of black gum pressed against its inside wall.

  Without looking up from the apple LoScalzo jerked his head toward the jar. “Know what they are?”

  They were the first words he had spoken since Murray had been ushered in and left there with him. They had been a long time coming.

  “No,” Murray said, “I don’t.”

  LoScalzo put down the knife and apple and heaved himself out of his chair. He went to the jar, and, using a pair of sugar tongs that had been lying next to it, he carefully lifted one of the blobs from the water.

  “Bloodsuckers,” he said affectionately. “Or, if you’re fussy, leeches. Couple of months ago some of the boys raided a barbershop on the Bowery that was peddling rotgut in the back room, and they brought back these little jokers along with the evidence. Some of the barbers down there still use them for black eyes. Just plant them on the swelling, and they’re supposed to do a fine job of bringing it down. Ever see one close up?”

  He thrust the tongs near Murray’s face, and the slimy thing they gripped writhed in a slow, blind motion of protest. Murray felt his gorge rising, but forced himself to sit rigid and unblinking. It was not easy. He had always had a revulsion for crawling things, and this one was like some monstrosity dredged up from his blackest nightmares.

  “Most people don’t like these jokers,” LoScalzo said. He finally dropped his captive back into the jar, and Murray’s breathing became easier. “I don’t know why, but that’s the way it goes. Take even a nervy guy like you. For a second there, it looked like you were all set to heave up over that nice expensive suit, so I guess you don’t like them either. Isn’t that a fact?”

  Murray did not vouchsafe an answer to this, and LoScalzo did not seem to expect any. He fitted himself into his chair, picked up the apple, and bit a chunk from it. “With me,” he pointed out, “it’s different. Bloodsuckers might turn your stomach, Kirk, but not mine. What makes me want to heave up is the kind of bastard who stakes out an apartment until he can catch a sick woman alone in it—a woman who’s this far away from being a mental case—and then hires some beat-up old actress to go along with him and fool the woman into talking about her husband’s troubles. That’s what can really set me off, Kirk. Or don’t you know what I’m talking about?”

  It was the tone as much as the words that did it, and in that instant Murray’s complacent sense of kinship vanished in an explosion of blind rage. Then he caught hold of himself. If there was anything LoScalzo wanted—if there was anything he had been aiming at with his whole performance—it was just this. It had almost worked, too, and Murray turned his wrath against himself for that. He had known that the cape was being waved in front of his nose to draw him on, had certainly suspected the blade behind it, and yet had been lured perilously close to wildly charging it and being left for dead. What LoScalzo would have to be taught now was that he was in the ring with the wrong bull.

  “No,” Murray said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I
see.” LoScalzo bit into the apple again, and chewed away steadily while he weighed this. “Then you deny that, while acting for a client last Monday, you and some woman entered the home of Ira Miller in his absence, and spoke to Mrs. Miller there?”

  Murray smiled. “You know I can’t deny something I haven’t been charged with. Are you charging me with breaking and entering?”

  LoScalzo smiled in return. “I’d like to,” he said pleasantly. “God knows how much I’d like to, Kirk, just to teach you it doesn’t pay to split legal hairs with me. But I won’t. What you and your accomplice were up to when you worked on Miller to change his testimony was conspiracy. And what you and another accomplice were up to when you tried to tamper with official records is also conspiracy. And all for one client, too. You must be in a real sweat about that client, Kirk, to put yourself on the spot for him this way.”

  “What spot?” Murray asked derisively. “If you thought you could make a case out of this, would we be sitting here talking about it? The hell we would. I’d be downstairs getting fingerprinted before you were finished peeling your apple.”

  LoScalzo’s eyebrows went up. “Who said anything about a case?” he asked mildly. He put the core of the apple into the plate, and carefully cleaned his hands with a handkerchief. “All I had in mind was a little hearing before the State Director of Licenses.”

  That had an unpleasant sound, and the more Murray considered it, the more unpleasant it sounded. The business of the police records was no problem, because Strauss had been smart enough not to walk into the trap set for him. But the business of Ira Miller was something else again. Miller and that ironclad nurse of his would make murderous witnesses at a hearing, and since Miller himself must have raised this issue with LoScalzo in the first place, there was no question about his willingness to appear as a witness. No question about the nurse, either. She’d jump through a hoop, if Miller told her to. And the thought of what they would have to say, and how they would say it, led to only one possible conclusion.

  “All right,” Murray said resignedly, “as the old joke had it: I get the point; you can take away the knife.”

  “Not yet,” said LoScalzo. “Not so fast, mister. I want to wait until Lundeen’s been brought to trial, and Miller’s taken the stand against him. Then we’ll see.”

  “See what? You don’t really expect Miller to run out on you, do you?”

  LoScalzo held his hands wide, palms up, in a sad gesture. “I’m a simple man,” he said. “A paisan. When I hear the dog who just tried to run my witness off the stand ask that question I get confused. What is it, Kirk? Are you dumber than you look, or are you so smart I can’t follow you?”

  “Dumber,” Murray said promptly.

  “Good. Just keep that in mind, and stay far away from my witnesses after this.”

  “And then?”

  “Then maybe you’ll be able to hang on to your license, and not have to worry about making an honest living digging ditches.”

  “Thanks,” Murray said. He was only too glad to get up from his chair. “And let me know when you run for governor. You can count on my vote.”

  It was the wrong joke to make at the wrong time. He knew it from the way LoScalzo rose to face him across the desk; the man’s collar suddenly seeming to be chokingly tight around the bull neck.

  “Kirk,” LoScalzo said in a deadly voice, “some time when you’re not busy framing divorce evidence do me a favor. Go through the newspapers and find out for yourself the kind of publicity I’m getting on this job. The kind of political build-up I’m getting. How many people know about me, and how many give a damn.”

  “Look,” Murray said, “you know I was only kidding.”

  “Nobody kids me about this, Kirk. Nobody at all. You want to know why? Because for thirty years I handled a practice that made me more money and got me into more dirt than I ever thought could wash off. When this job came along I took it like you take a steam bath—to get clean again. And nobody is going to dirty it for me!”

  He meant it, Murray knew. Savonarola on the scaffold could not have meant it more passionately. “I’m sorry,” Murray said. He held out his hand. “I’ll remember that.”

  LoScalzo looked down at the hand, and then raised his eyes. “Go on,” he said wearily. “Get out of here, before I throw you out.”

  It was not the words which cut deepest. It was not the rejection of the proffered hand. It was the look on LoScalzo’s face then. The same look, Murray knew, that he himself must have had when he was suddenly confronted by the nauseous thing LoScalzo had lifted from the jar for his benefit.

  15

  The distorted image of LoScalzo was with him through a series of horrendous dreams that night, and then—it seemed no more than a minute—after he had given up caring and sunk a thousand miles deep into dreamless oblivion, the ringing of the phone shrilly started him out of it.

  It was Mrs. Knapp. And, thought Murray, blearily aware of the daylight that flooded the room, it was Saturday morning. So it must be important.

  “There were two calls for you after you left yesterday,” Mrs. Knapp said. “One of them was from Mrs. Donaldson. She wanted to remind you to be at Mr. Princip’s studio tonight. She said to tell you that everything was taken care of, whatever that means.”

  “Good. Who was the other call from?”

  “George Wykoff, Duchess Harbor, Staten Island,” Mrs. Knapp said as if she were reciting an incantation, and Murray suddenly came wide awake. “The phone number’s unlisted, but he left it with me so that you could get in touch with him as soon as possible. Do you have pencil and paper handy?”

  “Hold it a second,” Murray answered, and lay back with his eyes closed to consider this development. Right now, he knew, there was a fair chance that one of LoScalzo’s bright young men was crouched in a thicket of telephone wires in the depths of the St. Stephen listening to every word. But it was too late to do anything about that, too late to do anything but curse the fisherman’s luck that lured a big one like Wykoff—a killer whale among sharks—to your bait, when all you could do was stand there with your hands tied and watch him get away.

  “Hello, are you there?” said Mrs. Knapp.

  “Yes. About that phone number, Mrs. Knapp, just tear it up. Forget about it. Is that clear?”

  One of Mrs. Knapp’s virtues was that nothing ever had to be repeated to her. “I understand. Is there anything else, Mr. Kirk?”

  “No,” said Murray. “That’s it.”

  The building that housed Alex Princip’s studio fronted the small rectangle of Gramercy Park; with its series of balconies and wroughtiron balustrades it might have been conveyed wholesale from New Orleans. The studio itself was large enough to serve as a basketball court, and when Murray walked in he found it filled with people, noise, and smoke. It was easy enough to pick out Alex in the crowd—he bulked a head taller than anyone else there, and his face, ferociously bearded and gleaming with sweat, shone like a beacon in the fog—and Didi was, of course, in attendance on him.

  “Say, what is this?” Murray said to her. “I was aiming at a little get-together. This looks like the gathering of the clans.”

  “Well, don’t blame me, sweetie.” Didi was concentrating on a pitcher of martinis which she swirled with practiced hands. “I asked hardly any people to start with, but they all wanted to bring somebody, and I couldn’t say no, could I?”

  “You could have tried. I’ll admit I’m flattered, considering this is all for little old me, but there are times—”

  “Oh, stop,” said Didi. “And you don’t have to be so flattered. The only reason it’s like this is because you’re paying for it. I mean instead of a picture. It’ll be on your bill from the St. Stephen, because they’re supplying everything here. They were very cooperative.”

  “I’ll bet they were. Is Ruth here?”

  “I said she would be, didn’t I? She’s over there somewhere.”

  He worked his way through the crowd in the direction point
ed out; it took him an anxious minute to locate Ruth. Then he caught sight of her, half-hidden by a circle of admiring males as he knew she would be, and evidently enjoying herself. A couple of the admirers were familiar to him. One was Ted Holloway, Didi’s whilom TV producer. The other, a chunky little man with the face of a leprechaun, had been one of Evan’s intimates. He had introduced himself to Murray, that night of the bard’s memorable display in the West Side saloon, simply as The O’Mearagh, an unappreciated poet with far more talent than Evan, but with considerably less sexual ardor.

  “That’s what does me in,” he had explained sadly. “We’re right back to the minnesingers again, when it was a case of sing to the count and—if you’ll excuse the expression—screw the countess. I am a man violently given to moderation. There’s no place for the likes of me in this neo-codpiece age.”

  Watching Ruth handle the circle around her, Murray saw that things were well under control. The party was in that phase in which interested males were surveying prospects, but were not yet ready to do anything about it. Then his view was momentarily obscured by a waiter—he recognized the man as a regular from the St. Stephen Grille—who, with loaded tray held high, swam into ken as effortlessly as an eel slipping through seaweed. The waiter recognized him, too. “Nice party, Mr. Kirk,” he said, lowering the tray. “Have something?”

  “No, thanks,” said Murray, and the man next to him said, “Well, I will,” and helped himself to a sandwich. Then he turned a darkly tanned, well-fed face to Murray. “Kirk?” he said. “Say, I know you. You worked for Frank Conmy, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so. Chipman’s the name. Joe Chipman. I used to run the agency that booked Frank’s radio interviews. Too bad about him, wasn’t it? But, of course, he was an old man when his time came.”

  He had sold his agency a couple of years ago, he explained in answer to Murray’s polite query, to go into independent film production with a partner on the Coast. “I talked myself into it,” he said. “When I handled the agency I spent so much time telling producers that movie business was on the upgrade that I finally got to believe it myself. I had no idea what a clever con man I was.”