“Oh, there you are,” he said, and then he groaned. “God, Megan, this room is the foulest mess. How can you stand having anyone see it like this?”
She glowered at him. “It isn’t a mess. Anyhow, Dr. Langstein said it was perfectly normal for somebody my age to be sloppy. You heard him say it.”
“I only wish he had to live in this room for a while, that’s what I wish,” said Harlingen. “Now get that goo off your face and go to sleep.”
At the doorway Murray turned. “Good night, Megan,” he said, and saw the smeared lips start to tremble, the drooping shoulders droop more than ever. “Hey,” he said, but Megan wheeled sharply around, turning her back to him.
“Kids,” said Harlingen darkly as he pulled the door shut. “Fourteen years old, act four, and expect to be treated like forty.” He led the way to a small room sparsely furnished as a study, and dropped into a chair behind a littered desk. “No, you won’t find much worth while there,” he said, as Murray squatted to study the contents of the low bookshelves along the wall. “Most of it’s jurisprudence—I took them along when I left the office—and those small ones are poetry by my wife. Privately printed, of course. She doesn’t write very good poetry, really, but she finds it a wonderful means of expressing herself.”
“I know,” said Murray. “She was telling me about it.”
“She was? Then you probably had a chance to see for yourself the kind of person she is. Muy simpática. And very outgoing. Very dynamic. As a matter of fact, she was the main force in getting me to strike out for myself.”
“You mean, practicing criminal law?”
“That’s right. And I’ve been very lucky in finding a client like Lundeen right off. You know, usually when you open shop like this you can go around in circles for a long time trying to dig up a client, but here I am, just getting started, and with a case ready for action.” Harlingen picked up a pencil and tapped its point in a nervous rhythm on the desk. “The trouble is,” he said plaintively, “that the case itself poses so damn many problems. I mean, there’s a lot of investigation to be done, a lot of legwork. And when you’re without a staff of any sort there’s just no way to cope. That’s where you come in.”
“Whoa,” said Murray. “I’m not in yet.”
Harlingen looked startled. “But I thought-”
“I know. But from my angle—from Conmy-Kirk’s angle—there are things about this kind of case I don’t like.”
“Ah, look. It’s a plain and simple indictment for perjury in the first. If I gave the impression—”
“Just how plain and simple?”
“Well, Lundeen’s a patrolman, a plainclothes man attached to the Vice Squad. Some time ago he arrested a man named Schrade, Eddie Schrade, for bookmaking. Then, when the Wykoff scandal broke, Schrade was called before the grand jury where he said his arrest was a fake; he was just a stand-in for the real culprit, an Ira Miller, one of Wykoff’s big shots.”
“It takes two witnesses to make a perjury case.”
“Miller’s the other one. He told the grand jury he had paid Lundeen a thousand dollars to arrest Schrade in his place, and when Lundeen wouldn’t recant his testimony he was indicted. Of course, Miller and Schrade are the sort of hoodlums who’d swear their own mother into the electric chair. The whole thing smells of frame-up a mile away.”
“Maybe yes,” said Murray. “Maybe no.”
Harlingen flushed. “Look,” he said earnestly, “this might sound a little top-heavy, it might sound like something you’ve heard before, but I count myself a pretty good judge of human nature. And before I agreed to take Lundeen as a client I made it a point to have a long, long talk with him. Not just about the case, mind you. What I really wanted to do was to get deep down inside, to sort of poke and prod around and see the man underneath. And what I saw was all right. I wouldn’t have touched the case if I didn’t think so.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Murray said. “Do you think that’s what I’m worried about: whether your man is a deserving case or not?”
“From what you said—”
“I didn’t say anything about that. You ought to know, Mr. Harlingen, that an outfit like mine doesn’t give a damn about a client’s character. For that matter, neither do most of the lawyers I know. We’d all be out of business tomorrow, if we did.” Murray shook his head. “That isn’t the point at all. What I’m getting at is that your case is tied right in with this Wykoff business, and I don’t like it. Wykoff’s testified that he’s been paying one million dollars a year in graft to the police for the past ten years. What does it mean, now that he’s blown the lid off the deal? It means that the whole department is as sick and surly as a bagful of rattlesnakes, and it’s not a bag I want to stick my hand into. Conmy-Kirk has always gotten along with the police on a nice, quiet, live-and-let-live basis. We’ll string along with that policy now.”
“But it’s my case,” argued Harlingen. “If there’s any trouble, I’m the one to take the responsibility.”
“Maybe, but the ax would still fall on us. In this state, Mr. Harlingen, an agency is hedged all around by a lot of nasty little statutes. If the police wanted to be literal about them, Conmy-Kirk would be in a fine mess.”
“Oh, great,” said Harlingen. “That’s great.” He held the pencil up to his eye and sighted along it. “What you’re telling me, then, is that if Lundeen wants his chance in court he’d damn well better go to some big law office where they have the staff to handle it personally. That’s what it comes down to, isn’t it?”
“No, it isn’t. There’s a couple of other agencies—Inter-American, Fleischer—pretty good outfits that might do just the job you want. Or,” said Murray in sudden enlightenment, “have you already tried them?”
The pencil cracked apart in Harlingen’s hand. “Sure, I tried them. Not that I didn’t have you in mind as the logical first choice, but, what the hell, Lundeen isn’t a rich man, and it was a case of trying to shop cheap at the outset. It didn’t matter. Every one of them is cold on this thing. The kind of work some of them offered to do wouldn’t even scratch the surface.”
“I see,” said Murray. It was embarrassing to watch Harlingen’s naked distress.
“And I can’t turn the case over to somebody else,” Harlingen said. “I just can’t see myself doing that.”
“Why not? There are law offices that would be glad to handle it. You could work along with one of them for the experience.”
“At my age?” Harlingen leaned forward toward Murray and spoke with slow intensity. “Do you know how old I am? I’m forty-five, man. Forty-five years old.”
“What about it? You’ve still got a long time to go.”
“Go where?” Harlingen demanded. “Ah, you don’t understand. You don’t understand at all. Don’t you see that now that I found the guts to walk out on a job as oldest office boy in town I can’t crawl back into another one like it? That’s what’s at stake here. It’s not just a matter of handling a case on my own. I know I can do a decent job on any case, if I have the chance. But I have to—well, it’s terribly important for me to get the chance. That’s the thing.”
“For you, yes,” said Murray wearily. “But I have to think of my agency’s interests.”
“That’s definite?”
“Yes.”
Harlingen hefted the broken pieces of pencil in his palm. Then he suddenly asked, “You wouldn’t mind if I got in touch with you again about this, I suppose?”
“I’m in the office every afternoon,” Murray said.
2
Cold November rain suddenly spattered against the window, and Mrs. Knapp rose from her chair, flicked on the overhead light, and drew the window curtains together. Murray waited until she sat down beside the desk again and picked up her pad. He fucked a finger at the Harlingen file before him.
“So eight years ago he sent this résumé and job application to Con-way Industrial, asking for a place in their legal department. And he was turned down. We know that, because
we happen to handle Con-way, but there’s more to it than meets the eye. I’ll bet my money against anybody’s marbles that there’s a load of his applications stuck away in files all over town. And all of them turned down the same way.”
“It’s possible.”
“It is, it is. The first few times, his old man must have put the quietus on things whenever he was asked for references. Then, all of a sudden, our boy finds that he’s over the forty-year mark. I leave it to you what chances anybody over forty has of getting a job with Conway. Or with any outfit like it.”
Mrs. Knapp’s lip curled. “If you’re asking me to feel sorry for someone who had a good thing with the J. D. Harlingen office, and who deliberately—”
“Uh-uh. Cherchez la femme. Also, cherchez the psychiatrist. Mrs. Harlingen is untangling her complexes by writing lousy poetry and having it printed up in nice expensive books. She and that professor of theirs must have convinced Harlingen that criminal law is just what he needs for his aching soul.”
“What about it?”
“Ah, but they overlooked one small point. If you foul up a poem, nobody goes to jail. It’s a little different with a perjury indictment.”
“That’s the client’s concern,” said Mrs. Knapp. “If we’re not working on the case, there’s no reason for us to get upset about it.”
“Take my word for it, I am not upset.”
“Well, if not about this, then about something else. You’ve been awfully edgy about a lot of things lately, Mr. Kirk. I’ve been thinking that a vacation might be called for.”
“It might. A tall, willowy, blond vacation. Cool-eyed but hot-blooded. Stupid but sinuous.”
“Strange,” observed Mrs. Knapp, “how all men’s minds run in the same channel.”
“Do they? I guess they do. Tell me, Mrs. Knapp, when you first came to work here, did Frank Conmy by any chance make a pass at you?”
“The question is out of order, Mr. Kirk. And we have a full day’s work to clear up.”
“Did he?”
Mrs. Knapp smiled. “He did. That was during Prohibition, so I had him take me over to a very nice speakeasy on East Thirty-ninth Street for a drink after work. He met my husband there. Mr. Knapp was the bartender.”
Murray slid down in his chair, closed his eyes, and folded his hands comfortably over his belt buckle. “That’s a terribly depressing story,” he said. “Let’s get on with the day’s work instead.”
It was a routine Friday—out-of-town reports to collate, assignments to arrange, all punctuated by incessant phone calls—but a vague restlessness in him made it seem endless. At four o’clock he drew open the window curtains and stood looking down at what could be seen of New York five stories below. Umbrellas, the first sprinkling of packages done up in Christmas wrappings, the first Santa Claus of the season, a scarecrow with the inevitable hand bell and tripod. He was calculating the chances of tossing a quarter into the collection pot from fifty feet above it, when the receptionist walked in and called him to attention.
“It’s a young lady, Mr. Kirk. She says it’s about an Arnold Lundeen.”
Murray pocketed the quarter. “What would you say she was, Miss Whiteside? Wife, sister, or friend of the family?”
“Engaged to him, I guess.” Miss Whiteside had the hauteur of a tearoom hostess, a passion for confession magazines, and a fine eye for detail. “She’s wearing a ring. One of those half-carat bargain things.”
“Anything else?”
“Well,” said Miss Whiteside, “she’s awfully pretty.”
Her eye had not deceived her. The girl was more than pretty; she was astonishingly beautiful. Ebony-dark hair, long-lashed blue eyes, camellia skin—or, Murray wondered, was gardenia supposed to be the word for it. Whatever it was, it was incredible that a cop, a dumb, dishonest New York cop, should ever have come into the possession of anything like this.
She sat down, placed a small overnight bag beside the chair, and opened her coat. It was a bulky tweed, the kind that Frank Conmy used to snarl at as Madison Avenue dowdy. “Whenever I see a fine-looking woman wearing stuff like that,” he had complained, “I always find myself wondering what the hell she’s ashamed of.”
“I’m Ruth Vincent,” the girl said; “Arnold Lundeen’s fiancée.” She sat primly on the edge of the chair, her hands clasped in her lap like an illustration of decorous good posture. “Mr. Harlingen called me this morning before he left town. He told me all about talking to you last night, but he said that maybe if I spoke to you personally—I mean, explained things from Arnold’s point of view—you might change your mind. That’s why I’m here.”
“I see.” Murray carefully arranged two pieces of paper on the desk, edge to edge. “How is it that Lundeen isn’t here himself? Something wrong with him?”
“No, but he’s working today, and I’m not. An army friend of his got him a job in a diner, but it’s way out on Long Island, near East Hampton, so he stays out there during the week.”
“That sounds pretty inconvenient for all concerned, doesn’t it?”
Ruth Vincent said in a tight voice: “It’s not easy for a policeman under suspension to get a job anywhere, Mr. Kirk. He takes what he can get.”
“True enough. And what do you work at, Miss Vincent? Modeling?” He gestured at the overnight bag, and the girl glanced down at it.
“Oh, that. No, it’s full of notes and papers I’ve been putting together at the library. I’m a teacher.”
“A teacher?”
“Yes,” Ruth Vincent said flatly.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“I know. It was meant to be flattering, except that it isn’t.”
“It should be.”
“Why? Are you flattered any time a woman walks into this strangely sedate office, sees the handsome, Brooks Brothers type of executive behind its desk, and says in that same tone, ‘A detective?’ ”
“I don’t know,” Murray said. “It’s never happened.”
“I doubt that. Meanwhile, Mr. Kirk, take my word for it that I’m in the English Department at the Homestead School, a very highly regarded private school which, I’ve been told, hires its teachers for their ability. Don’t mind if that sounds stuffy. It’s a little something I memorized a long time ago.”
“Mea culpa,” said Murray cheerfully. “Mea maxima culpa. Miss Vincent, by any chance is there a kid named Megan Harlingen in your school?”
“Why, yes. She’s Mr. Harlingen’s daughter.”
“I know. Is that how you met Harlingen? How he happened to get Lundeen’s case?”
“In a way. Arnold’s first lawyer was someone from his political club, a John McCadden. When it became clear that McCadden was half-hearted about the case, when he got around to suggesting that Arnold plead guilty, that maybe a deal with the District Attorney could be made on that basis, we knew we had to find someone else.”
“But why Harlingen?”
“Why? For one thing, he’s been a lawyer for twenty years, Mr. Kirk. More than that, he’s been as much a friend to us from the start as a lawyer. You find yourself counting your friends very carefully at a time like this, believe me.”
“I’m not denying that. I’m not even denying that Ralph Harlingen is a nice guy with a great big heart shaped like a valentine. Count him as a friend, if you want to.”
“I have every reason to. And I don’t see what you’re driving at.”
Murray dug his fingers into the nape of his neck. “What I’m driving at is that he’s not the man to handle this case.”
The color rose in the girl’s face. “That fascinates me. I mean, the ethics of it. How anyone in your position—”
“Lady, people in my position make up their ethics from day to day, so don’t let it bother you for a minute. The fact is that as a lawyer Harlingen isn’t in the same league as Johnny McCadden. Didn’t it ever strike you that McCadden knew what he was doing when he told your boy friend to take a guilty plea? That it might mean an easier sentenc
e on a sure conviction?”
The girl stared at him. “I see,” she said hoarsely, and cleared her throat with an effort. “Then there’s no doubt about Arnold’s being convicted. About his being found guilty.”
“I didn’t say that.”
She shook her head slowly. “Oh, please, don’t start backing away now, Mr. Kirk. You’ve been doing fine so far.”
“All right,” said Murray angrily, “if you want to play it that way, let’s do it. I know McCadden, because I’ve done work for the Hirsch and McCadden office, and when they want to soft-pedal a case they’ve got good reasons for it. And I know that ten of these Wykoff cases have been tried already, and the D.A.’s had a field day with them. And I know cops. Is there anything more you’d like me to say?”
“Yes,” the girl answered, and her voice trembled. “Now tell me what you know about cops. What makes you God Almighty to pass judgment on anybody who happens to wear a badge? I want to know.”
“No, you don’t. What you want me to tell you is that Lundeen had nothing to do with the Wykoff mob. That he never took graft in his life. That when all this passes away like a bad dream, he’ll be standing there with a halo on his head, right in the middle of this best of all possible worlds. All right, consider it said.”
“But you don’t believe it?”
“Not for one little second. In my book your boy friend is as guilty as they come.”
“In your book! Without evidence!”
“Evidence!” Murray cried. “What do you think McCadden was worrying about when he gave you his opinion? Everything he turned up on the case must have told him Lundeen was a loser! And it wasn’t McCadden’s fault; he’s a good man with a good staff. The same thing would happen whoever worked on the case! It would happen if I worked on it for Harlingen!”
“Then why don’t you!”
He looked at her, not comprehending at first, and she looked back at him, stonily beautiful, rigidly defiant, only the hands knotting together in her lap giving her away.
“You mean,” he said, “take Lundeen’s money to help hang him?”
“Why not?” she whispered, hating him with her eyes. “From what you’ve told me, you ought to enjoy doing it!”
The Eighth Circle Page 3
