The Eighth Circle

by Stanley Ellin

  Which explains the messages, Murray thought, glancing at the crumpled slips of paper on the bed. Then he realized that it didn’t. Not quite.

  He said, “While you were at it, did you call Mrs. Donaldson, too?”

  “Yes, she was at Alex’s.”

  “What did she have to say? I spoke to her a few minutes ago, and she sounded a little offbeat. I was wondering about it.”

  “Oh? Well, I explained to her about how worried I was, because I was supposed to see you tonight—last night, that is—but that you had simply disappeared into nowhere. Then she—we talked a bit, and that’s all. What makes you think there was something wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” Murray said. “But don’t let it bother you. I’ve got something more important on tap, anyhow.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s about Arnold, but I’d rather not discuss it over the phone. Can I get together with you and Ralph at your place now, or do you want to make it tomorrow?”

  “Make it now,” Ruth said. “I’ll call Ralph and have him here. Is it good or bad?”

  “It’s not good,” Murray said.

  Ruth was waiting at the door when he arrived, and while he was hanging up his dripping hat and coat on an old-fashioned wall rack he observed that she was still dressed for an evening out, and that the shapeless woolen cardigan she had thrown on over her pale blue, brocaded sheath in no way lessened its effect on him.

  Ralph, she said, would be there soon. He had been up when she phoned him, because Dinah’s folks were in from Philadelphia, and they had all been sitting around and talking at the Harlingens’. Dinah’s parents were Quakers, Ruth added gratuitously, as if under a nervous compulsion to make conversation, and really the most enchanting people. They worried all the time about the way Megan was being brought up, but Megan had once told her that when she was with them in Philadelphia they spoiled her worse than anybody. Trust Megan to know a good thing when she saw it.

  Ruth’s father came tramping up from the cellar during this recitative. In his slippers and robe, his few remaining hairs clipped close to the skull, and with a good humorous face and fine eyes, Vincent was the passable facsimile of a monk out of Balzac. He greeted Murray cordially, and explained that he had been down in the cellar to check possible seepage there because of the rain. The original foundation of the house had been built over a supposedly dry brook bed—a branch of the Minetta, most likely—but every time it rained hard enough the brook mysteriously came to life.

  “She’s alive and kicking now, all right,” Vincent said, not overconcerned. “If you want some fine fishing tomorrow, this is the place for it. We’ll have the boats out.”

  “Tommy, you’re impossible,” Ruth said. “You promised Mother you’d have it fixed last summer, didn’t you?”

  “Did I? Well, I’ll have to get her a life preserver, instead. You know,” he said to Murray, “Ruth’s been telling me a great deal about you, and I have a hunch I once knew your father. I can see a distinct resemblance when I look at you. Was his that store near the south gate on Broadway?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t that the damndest thing? I’m positive he’s the one. That was, oh, around twenty-five years ago, during the early part of the Depression. I was on my fellowship then. I used to drop in for a sandwich and milk there, because it was the cheapest place in the neighborhood.”

  “He wasn’t much of a businessman,” Murray said.

  “No, I suppose he wasn’t. But he was a great conversationalist, as I recall. The most ingenuous sort of Utopian, and full of wonderful, visionary schemes for the improvement of mankind. He used to write verses about them, and make everyone who came into the store read them. Of course, a lot of us lived with visions in those days. We were all firebrands of one sort or another. But I don’t think your father was a firebrand in that sense. He seemed to have a different spirit. Luminous, you might call it. You can see how well I remember him.”

  And here, Murray thought, we have another member of the cult, another one of that jolly band of middle-aged intellectuals who got through the Depression with their pride in one piece, and who wistfully look back on it now as the Great Adventure. He had met others of this breed before, and found them as readily identifiable as only cultists can be. Full of talk about that bright time when they were all paupers together, when Ideas Not Money was the common currency, when there was an Intellectual Ferment in the Air. Full of talk about the snows of yesteryear, and never asking what had become of the old men who were paid ten cents an hour to shovel it away.

  But this particular member of the cult, he knew, happened to be Ruth’s father, and the smart thing to do was tread warily and speak softly. So he trod warily and spoke softly until Harlingen arrived, rain-sodden and full of apologies about the time it had taken him to drive down, and Vincent said a round of good nights and went upstairs. Watching him go, Murray found almost with annoyance that he liked the man. It made him wonder how anyone of that caliber could remotely think of allowing his daughter to marry an Arnold Lundeen. Under any conditions, it wasn’t possible that he could be happy about it.

  Harlingen was very much at home here. He made his way unerringly to a liquor cabinet in the living room, and searched through it, holding up one bottle after another to the light to read the label.

  “Sherry,” he complained. “Sherry, and again sherry. You know what the trouble is? Those kids in Tommy’s classes keep reading novels where college professors are always drinking sherry, so comes Christmas they load him up with the stuff. I wish somebody would write a book where college teachers only drink Scotch. Good twelve-year-old Scotch, preferably.”

  He finally came up with an almost empty bottle of whiskey and poured out three drinks. When he had served the others he downed his own with a gulp and a shudder. “All right,” he said to Murray, “I’m ready for the bad news. It isn’t too bad, I hope.”

  “I’ll leave that up to you. Do you remember when we were with Benny Floyd at the lunch stand that day, and I said I wanted to yank the grapevine and see if we could stir up Wykoff?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we stirred him up.” Murray turned to Ruth. “That’s what happened to our date. Wykoff sent over a tough to fetch me along to Staten Island, and I wasn’t offered any choice about it, either.”

  Part of Ruth’s untasted drink splashed into her lap. “Oh, no!” she said.

  “Wykoff?” said Harlingen in astonishment. “A man in his position trying a stunt like that? Why, if the authorities—”

  “What authorities?” Murray said. “Look, let’s not kid ourselves. If it’s anything to do with Wykoff, LoScalzo’s the man in charge, and right now LoScalzo would like nothing better than to leave me for dead. But that’s not the point. What I’m getting at is Wykoff’s angle. Evidently, my working on the case bothers him. He wants me out. And to prove to me that I might as well get out he offered me the evidence that Arnold was guilty.”

  “He couldn’t have!” Ruth said. “There isn’t any such evidence, unless he made it up!”

  Harlingen waved a silencing hand at her, his eyes fixed on Murray. “What evidence, Murray?”

  “Wykoff’s got his records locked up in the house there,” Murray said. “And he’s got a record in black and white of the pay-off Miller made to Arnold on May third.”

  “In what form?” Harlingen said witheringly. “A signed receipt?”

  The atmosphere around him, Murray saw, was as chill now as it had been when he was in Wykoff’s television room. Wherever I am, he thought, there is no man’s land, and he had never found the thought more bitter since the day he had walked into Frank Conmy’s office and learned to do things Frank Conmy’s way. It was the look in Ruth’s eyes that made it bitter.

  He said in defiance of that look: “You know damn well there’s no signed receipt, but that doesn’t mean anything. Wykoff ran his racket like a business. He’s that kind of man; you’d have to meet him to appreciate it. He’s the kind of man
who brings you out to see him at the point of a gun, and then has his lawyer on the spot so everything’ll be handled the right way. If you told him he was just another racketeer he’d probably give you a whole line about how you can’t legislate morality, and being forced to do illegally what should be legal, and all the rest of it. But because he is that way he’s kept records of what went on while he was running the bookies around here. And he does have a record of Arnold’s graft. And it means that Miller and Schrade are telling the truth. Maybe you don’t know it, Ralph, but the toughest man to handle on the witness stand is a crook who finds himself telling the truth for the first time in his life and is glad to make the most of it. That’s what you’re up against here, so you can see how much of a case you’ve got.”

  Harlingen said: “It seems to me we’ve run through a routine like this before. You didn’t get me here at this hour just to repeat it to me, did you?”

  “No, I wanted you here to listen to some advice. First thing tomorrow you get Arnold into town and explain all this to him. Then see if he won’t appear before the grand jury again and recant his testimony. If he won’t, see if you can’t get him to plead guilty to a lesser count of the indictment. Perjury in the second, let’s say. I don’t know if LoScalzo would be interested in making a deal, but he might be talked to on that basis. The only trouble is that he’s holding the winning hand and knows it.”

  “Is that the only trouble?” Harlingen said. “What kind of hand are you holding, Murray? I wonder about that.”

  “What does that mean?” Murray asked.

  Ruth came to her feet and confronted him, her arms clasped over her chest, her fingers digging hard into the sleeves of the sweater. “You know what it means,” she told him scathingly. “How much did Wykoff pay you to say this, that’s what it means. Well, how much was it? More than Arnold could pay?”

  It left Murray with the feeling he had had after Caxton had hit him. Worse than that. He had been hurt by Caxton, but he had not been afraid. He was afraid now. “Ruth,” he said, “I swear that I never took a penny from Wykoff. He didn’t offer me anything, and I didn’t take anything.”

  “You mean, all he did was tell you what to do, and you’re doing it,” she said sweetly. Too sweetly. “He threatened you.”

  “No,” Murray said, “he didn’t threaten me. He threatened you. He had us followed Saturday night, and he’s got you marked. It doesn’t mean anything as long as I don’t step on his toes, but even so, starting tomorrow I’m assigning a man to keep an eye on you until all this blows over. You won’t have anything to worry about.”

  “I won’t have anything to worry about? Oh, please, please, let’s not drag this down to the level of melodrama. You don’t really think it makes it any more convincing, do you?”

  He wanted to hit her then. He could feel all through him the release he’d get from the impact of his hand against her face. She must have sensed that, too. She took an involuntary step back as he stood up, and that rather pleased him.

  “What’re you afraid of?” he asked her. “A little melodrama? You know I’m only hamming it up. The whole thing’s a big joke.” He looked at Harlingen, who was not smiling now. “Same as what happened to that little Puerto Rican who ran the lunch stand we were at. Remember him, Ralph? A genuine innocent bystander, wasn’t he? That is, until Wykoff got the idea he knew more than he was telling, and had a couple of the boys send him to the hospital for repairs.”

  “You don’t mean that,” Harlingen said.

  “You want to call up Montefiore right now, and ask how the patient is doing? The name is García. Oh, he’s probably listed as an accident case, but I wouldn’t let that fool me, if I were you. I know how sensitive you are about anybody fooling you.”

  “That’s not very funny,” Harlingen said.

  “No? Well, I’m only laughing to keep from crying. How would you feel in my place? Or you?” he asked Ruth. “Do I sound more convincing now?”

  She shook her head furiously. “No,” she said with hard emphasis. “No. No. No!”

  “My God, don’t you know me well enough by now to trust me?” he pleaded.

  She said: “I thought I did! I thought—oh, what’s the sense of going through all that? I was wrong, that’s all. I was so wrong. And Arnold was right.”

  “About what?”

  “About you. The last time I talked to him about you he said I was being stupid. He said anyone who trusted private detectives was stupid. They were all the same. They were dirty, rotten cheats who’d do anything for money. Anybody who came along could buy them, because that’s the kind of business they were in—selling something dirty to people who could pay for it!”

  When you were sufficiently enraged, Murray found, you really saw red. Ruth—Harlingen—the whole room around him wavered in a reddish haze. He said hoarsely, “And sure as hell, Arnold is the judge, jury, and executioner in this case, isn’t he? He’s Death right out of your pet play. He’s a mighty smart cop who knows all the answers. By God, every day he’s on trial I’ll be the first one in court and the last one out. It’ll be a pleasure to watch them break him wide open!”

  “I believe that,” Ruth whispered. “Oh, how I believe that now. But whatever happens, Murray, take my advice. Don’t order theater tickets or make restaurant reservations for a celebration, if you’re expecting me to celebrate with you. Don’t plan any post-mortems where suddenly we’ll be holding hands in the moonlight. Up to now you’ve been making good time, I’m ashamed to say. You’ve been taking me for a lovely ride. But here’s where I get off. Your friend Mrs. Donaldson would like that, I’m sure!”

  Harlingen, who had been following this with growing concern, could not contain himself any longer. “Like what?” he said explosively. “Have both of you gone crazy? You’re acting like a pair of neurotics on a binge. Is that what we’re here for?”

  “Will you please shut up?” Murray said in a dangerous voice. He wheeled on Ruth again. “Go on, let’s have it. What’s Mrs. Donaldson got to do with all this?”

  Ruth clasped her hands together hard enough to make the knuckles show white. “She rounded out the picture for me this evening. I didn’t tell you all about our little talk on the phone, did I? That’s because I was still on that lovely ride, and I didn’t want anything to spoil it. Not even when she asked me if you had gotten your money’s worth out of me for what her party had cost you. Yes, she put it exactly in those words, and you don’t have to look so shocked about it. She’s jealous, of course. That’s what you ought to worry about. Not about some comic-book gangsters shooting me, but about her shooting you, because she doesn’t like you to chase around after other women. She may forget how pathetic she is and do it some night!”

  Murray said: “Is she the only one who’s jealous? What would you say Arnold was right now? You must have told him some interesting things about me to heat him up like this.”

  “Yes,” Ruth said, “I did. If I had sense enough to keep my mouth shut I wouldn’t have to be sorry about it now. But Arnold and I have never been much on concealing things from each other. We’ve never gotten the fun out of being devious and dishonest that you do. You need practice to enjoy it, don’t you?”

  “I suppose so,” Murray said, and then pushed conscience aside. “Why don’t you ask Arnold about that?”

  “I think we’re all in a mood,” Harlingen interposed, and looked at his watch. “No wonder. It’s almost two, and since we’re only talking in circles—”

  His intentions were good, Murray knew, but if there was anything bound to put Ruth on her guard it was the apprehension in that voice. And Ruth was on guard immediately. “What do you mean?” she asked Murray. “What are you getting at?”

  The image of Lundeen lay in his hand, his own wax doll whose time had come. He slowly crushed it in his fist. “Ruth,” he said, “Arnold’s been playing you for a fool right along. He’s got another girl on the string who’s not only sleeping with him, but who thinks he’s going to marry her.
He’ll have a hard time getting out of it when she sets the date.”

  Ruth looked at him open-mouthed, and her expression was one of sheer incredulity. “My God,” she said, “what a mind. It’s fascinating. It’s absolutely fascinating.”

  “It’s not that fascinating,” Murray said, and looked at Harlingen. “Go on, tell her, why don’t you?”

  “Tell her what?” Harlingen said angrily. “Hearsay doesn’t mean anything. Whatever I know about that girl is from your report.”

  “Which applies to Wykoff, too,” Ruth pointed out. “And Miller. And anyone else you’d care to name, doesn’t it?”

  She was triumphant now, Murray saw. She had Harlingen on her side, and truth and justice and righteousness. It was almost a shame to knock all the fine sentiment out of her.

  “Get your coat,” Murray told her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve got to be ready for a day’s work in a few hours. I don’t feel like going out now looking for adventure.”

  “It won’t be any adventure. You’re going to meet Arnold’s little friend, whether you want to or not. Get your coat.”

  Harlingen said: “This is ridiculous, Murray. What are you going to do, wake up everybody in New York at this hour to prove a point? Can’t it wait until a sensible time?”

  “No,” Murray said, “it can’t. In your language, Ralph, I’m a nice friendly fella, but in the last eight hours I’ve had a gun pulled on me, been manhandled, swindled at bridge, blackmailed, and called a liar more times than I can count. And I’m going to finish up in style. Either Miss Vincent here gets her coat and comes along peaceably, or I drag her out into the rain by the scruff of her neck. And if anybody tries to stop me I’ve got eight hours of misery I’m itching to get rid of at one wallop. I’m not fooling, Ralph. Nothing will happen as long as everybody stays in line. I think you know what I mean. You must have had days like this, too.”