The Eighth Circle

by Stanley Ellin

  “I leave that to you,” Murray said impassively. “In all fairness though, I ought to tell you that I sometimes read books. I look up the hard words in the dictionary.”

  “That’s a sound policy. Would you mind my asking a highly impertinent question?”

  “It all depends.”

  “Well, I’m not being condescending this time, I’m being curious. How did someone like you happen to become a private detective in the first place?”

  “I was seeking worldly advancement. How’d you happen to become a schoolteacher?”

  “Oh, predestination, I guess. I was the little girl who took charge of the other kids on the block as far back as I can remember. Taught them games, read to them, made up plays to act, generally ran them ragged. And loved it. I mean, I did. Not being conversant with the latest educational theories at the time, I never bothered to ask if they did.”

  “What block was this?”

  “Same old block. Barrow Street. My family’s owned the house there since the Village was really a village. It’s kind of an interesting house, too, if you don’t mind weird plumbing.”

  He noted that no invitation was included in this, but let it pass. “You don’t live there alone, do you?”

  “No, both parents are present and accounted for. Dad’s a history teacher up at Columbia.”

  “He is? That’s my old stamping ground.”

  “Well, what do you know,” said Ruth. “When did you go there?”

  “I didn’t. I went to City. But my father ran a grocery across the street from Columbia—I think he was friends with every teacher there—and let me tell you, no one ever worshiped more devoutly at those gates than I did. Did you know that a miserably underrated Columbia team once went out to California and beat mighty Stanford in the Rose Bowl? It took me years to get over that. I must have been run off the campus twenty times that spring trying to get the autograph of every man on the squad. College football has never been the same since then.”

  Ruth groaned. “That’s what you think. Did you know that after you left the Harlingens’ Saturday Ralph had that television set blasting away all afternoon with one game after another? There I was working with Megan in her bedroom, and I couldn’t even hear myself talk. And then Dinah would drop in now and then to explain over the noise that a medieval play was all a mistake to start with. So let’s not underrate college football. It had me so unnerved that I seriously considered working on a new play altogether.”

  “Which one?”

  “Oh, something by that Welsh poet, Evan Griffith. It’s perfectly beautiful, and a lot of fun. Have you read him?”

  “I’ve read him. Didi was a friend of his.”

  “Of Evan Griffith?”

  “Let’s not underrate Didi, shall we?” He risked looking at her now, and found that she was regarding him with the open-mouthed wonder of a child. “Jesus, what’s so wonderful about knowing Evan Griffith?”

  “Because it is. Because he—oh, never mind. Did you know him, too?”

  “No, I just met him once.”

  “Well, what was he like?”

  Murray considered that. “Very talented.”

  “You know that isn’t what I meant,” Ruth said impatiently. “What was he like in person?”

  “Didi can tell you better than I can. Ask her about it sometime.”

  “All right, I will,” Ruth said firmly, and then peered inquiringly through the windshield. “Why are we turning off here? It’s only Fifty-seventh Street.”

  “Because I want to go down the Drive. It’s roundabout, but we’ll miss the traffic. And I wanted to talk about Arnold without worrying about the traffic. After all, that’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Ruth said. “What about Arnold?”

  “Well, you remember when he came up to the office and recorded his story of the story?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what I’d like you to do now. Make believe I’m a recorder and just tell me all you can about him from the time you two met. Don’t worry about how personal you get, or how irrelevant something may seem to be; it’s all grist for the mill. Would you mind doing that?”

  “No. But wouldn’t it be better if Arnold did it himself? I’m only-”

  “We’ll get to that some other time. Meanwhile, this is a necessary part of the picture. Make believe I’m not even here, that you’re talking out loud to yourself. You’d be surprised how much help this kind of thing can be when a report is being put together.”

  The elevated drive unwound along the Hudson River piers, and Murray drove at an easy speed, watching the sun slowly settle into the Jersey hills across the river, keeping an eye on the big ships berthed along the way, trying to identify them by the markings on their stacks before he reached them, listening to Ruth with half an ear as she talked. But most of all, he was conscious of the girl’s body next to him, her head back against the seat, her knee almost touching his. It would have been easy to rest an arm casually along the back of that seat, to move a knee the fraction of an inch necessary to provide an electric contact. But he did not. He drove at an easy speed, and listened to her talking about Arnold Lundeen.

  She had met Arnold in high school. She had never dated or even known any other boy before or after Arnold. He was the only one. At first it had merely been a matter of helping him sometimes with his studies, because he was a poor student, and then suddenly they were going together all the time. This was a feather in both then-caps, if you wanted to look at it that way. Arnold was a school hero pursued by all the girls in his classes, and she herself had been—well, boys had always tagged around after her, even though she never encouraged them to. So both she and Arnold had, in effect, made enviable conquests.

  After he graduated, Arnold had trouble finding a place for himself. He couldn’t get a steady job because he was of draft age, and no company would risk training him and then losing him to the army. So he hung around with one of those local gangs of leather-jacketed boys who admired him for his past glory. She hated that. Not because there was anything criminal about the boys, but because they were like lost souls without any direction in life, and Arnold was head and shoulders above them. She had fought this out with him several times, and then the whole thing was settled by the draft, anyhow.

  He was overseas most of his time in the army, but wrote voluminously. His letters were sometimes so intense that they were embarrassing, but they were always touching. The one bad spell came about because of the picture. He had written her for a picture of herself in a bathing suit, and she had, after consideration, refused to send one. Their next letters became so violent about this silly business that she finally sent him a picture which—well, all she could do was hope he wasn’t showing it around like a prize trophy. Not that she couldn’t understand why he had brought up the whole thing in the first place. He loved her, he was proud of her, he wanted everyone to know why. It was a compliment, really, although a distressing one.

  When he came home he immediately looked for work, but now, ironically, he was unskilled and untrained; there was no worthwhile job open to him. It was her father who first had the idea of the police, and it was he who pulled a few political strings to make sure that Arnold would have no trouble getting his appointment. On the day he got the appointment Arnold proposed to her. She hadn’t wanted to accept—there were several reasons for that—but he had finally persuaded her to wear his ring without setting any date for the wedding.

  He got along well as a uniformed policeman for a while; so well that he was picked for duty with the Vice Squad. Things changed for the worse after that. He hated his work, hated the business of tricking prostitutes into accepting his money in dirty hotel rooms, hated the way bookies jeered and threatened when he arrested them, hated the feeling that everyone he knew was always silently accusing him of taking graft. And he had been afraid to ask for a transfer to different duty, because then both the men on the squad and in the rest of the force would eye him with do
uble suspicion.

  That was how matters stood when LoScalzo struck his blow. Now, all that was left was the hope that justice could be had in court. That there was some way of assuring it, of taking the bandages off those blind eyes so that they could clearly see Arnold Lundeen’s innocence.

  “I don’t like that statue,” Ruth said wearily. She turned to look at Murray, her head still against the seat. “I never liked it. I remember when I was a little girl I once wondered why it was blindfolded, and even after I found out it seemed all wrong.”

  Murray had timed the trip perfectly. He turned the car into Barrow Street and pulled up before the house Ruth pointed out. She made no motion to get out, and, almost abstractedly, he let his arm fall across the top of the seat so that it brushed her hair.

  “Cigarette?” he asked.

  “No, thanks.”

  He thrust the unopened pack back into his pocket. “Funny thing,” he said. “This is the first time since we met each other that I’ve seen you even halfway relaxed.”

  “It is? I guess it is. Maybe I just talked myself out. You’re a good listener.”

  “And you’ve been needing one for a long time. Even if it is somebody you almost took apart a couple of weeks ago for saying that Arnold was guilty. Say, how do you know I still don’t feel that way about him?”

  “Because you don’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well,” Ruth said slowly, “it’s a little involved, but what it comes down to is that you’re not really the stereotype you wanted me to think you were. You know, that cynical, hard-bitten private-detective role you were playing. It’s not you. Not at all.”

  “Since that’s probably intended to be a compliment, thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. Now I have to run along. If you don’t mind.”

  He closed his hand on her shoulder and felt her go rigid against it. “Look,” he said earnestly, “your trouble is that you’re going around with the pressure on you all the time, and that makes no sense at all. Arnold has not been tried and found guilty; he is not locked up somewhere; you don’t have to run inside to write him a letter or bake him a pie with a file in it. I mean it. There’s no reason in the world why you and I couldn’t go somewhere to dinner, and then you—”

  She furiously wrenched her shoulder from his grasp and fumbled for the handle of the door. Murray watched with astonishment her frantic efforts to open it. “Jesus!” he said. “What’s all this about? I’m not trying to force you to do something you don’t want to do. All you have to do is say no.”

  He reached over and thrust open the door. She got out and faced him from the sidewalk.

  “In that case,” she said: “no!”

  11

  The Brother Frank routine was an ancient and familiar one at the agency. Murray skipped his shave the next morning, and a few minutes after he walked into the office with an itching jaw, Bruno arrived carrying a battered valise and a week-old copy of the Chicago Tribune that he had picked up at the out-of-town newsstand on Times Square. Neither of them said anything about their previous day’s passage on the phone, and there was nothing in Bruno’s manner to indicate that he would make any issue of it. This did not surprise Murray. Any showdown on Collins, he knew, would be held in abeyance until after the Christmas bonuses had been handed out.

  Bruno’s letter and cards with the Coney Island postmark on them had been delivered in the first mail, and Mrs. Knapp had already laid them out on the desk. The job of daubing the postmarks with a touch of India ink to blur the dates, erasing the addresses, readdressing them to a nonexistent M. Schrade at a dummy number in Chicago, padding the valise with sheets of the Tribune, and shaking up the few articles of wear in it to eliminate all traces of Lucy Manfredi’s neat hand at packing took no more than ten minutes.

  Lou Strauss came in while this was going on and seated himself comfortably on a corner of the desk. “That’s what I like to see,” he told Murray: “the boss going to work with the rest of the slaves. That’s what I call democracy in action. Who’s the pigeon?”

  “Schrade,” said Murray. “Remember the name?”

  “You don’t have to be so sarcastic, because that’s what I’m here to talk about. Say, don’t you have a bottle to go in that bag? Who do you know ever took the train from Chicago without a pint on him?”

  “Let me worry about that,” Murray said. “What about those Miller and Schrade records? Did you get them?”

  “No, but let me tell you.” Strauss reached down and reflectively scratched an ankle. “There’s something funny going on, Murray. You know how that guy at Records always cooperates? Now, all of a sudden, he’s very careful. Three, four times I get in touch with him, and he don’t know, he’ll see me later, we’re getting nowhere. Then yesterday he calls me at home in the morning to have dinner with him at a chop suey place, and we’ll do business. I meet him, we sit down at the table, and one minute later what do I see at the next table but a snoop.”

  “How did you know?” Murray asked.

  “I know, all right. It was the old newspaper act. He wasn’t eating anything, just drinking some tea, and he had the newspaper open up to his nose, with the eyes over it. I been in this business a long time, Murray. I know the newspaper act when I see it. So I stopped right there, because what’s the sense of monkeying with a frame-up like that? I gave the money back to Mrs. K. when I came in. It wouldn’t buy anything but trouble, anyhow.”

  “You’re sure about all this?”

  “I’m sure. After we ate I walked this guy from Records a couple of blocks, and the snoop was with us until I said good-by. Believe me, I was careful not to even shake hands.”

  “All right then, we’ll let it go at that. You’re on another assignment now, aren’t you?”

  “I’m on a crazy trucking deal looking for hijackers that ain’t there,” Strauss said, aggrieved. “At my age Mrs. K. thinks I need muscles, so I’m a helper on a truck. But who knows?” he said philosophically as he took his departure. “With a little luck I could get a rupture and retire on workmen’s compensation.”

  The valise was ready now, and Murray turned his attention to Bruno’s letters and cards. Both letters and one of the cards mentioned the woes of the music writing business and asked for money. These were tucked away in the valise. The other card was short and to the point. Dear Brother Murray, it read: I am in trouble very bad and will tell you when you hit New York. My address is the same. The signature was an undecipherable scrawl.

  Murray put this one into his coat pocket, then picked up the valise and posed for Bruno. “How does it look?”

  “Good enough. Maybe you could use some more wrinkles in that overcoat. Roll it up and sit on it in the cab.”

  “I’ll do that. You didn’t put anything with a New York label on it in the bag, did you?”

  “No, it’s the same old Chicago stuff we always use. And be careful with this guy when you talk to him. He knows I was there yesterday, so he might smell something. Don’t push too hard.”

  “You mean, not if I want to come back with all my teeth.”

  “That’s what I mean,” said Bruno.

  Before he left, Murray spoke to Mrs. Knapp. “I want you to call Mrs. Donaldson for me,” he told her. “Start phoning her at noon, and keep ringing until you get her. Tell her I’ll be around at seven this evening to take her to dinner. Tell her it doesn’t matter what else she had planned, this is very important.”

  “All right,” said Mrs. Knapp, and then said in mild reproof, “I suppose you’ll be gone all day, won’t you?”

  “Probably. Why?”

  “Because you’re letting an awful lot of work pile up here, Mr. Kirk. Look at it. There must be three days’ mail in that basket. And these contracts should have been sent out yesterday, but you haven’t even read them yet. And all these expense accounts to okay. I know you’re taking a special interest in the Lundeen case, but really, you can’t afford to neglect everything else for it.”

&nbs
p; “I see. Well, Friday you can lock me in here and not let me out until everything is cleared up. Fair enough?”

  “Yes, if you mean it. Oh, and there’s something else you ought to know about. One of the girls—that Mae Bridges—was transcribing a tape, and I caught her making an extra copy of the report. She said that it was all a mistake, that she didn’t know she had the extra carbon in her machine, but of course she was lying. I checked her locker and found another report in the lining of her coat.”

  “Hell,” said Murray, “the way things are getting to be they’ll have to pass a copyright law to take care of us.”

  “Do you want to talk to her about it?”

  “No, you can handle it. Try to find out who she’s dealing with, and then fire her, whether she tells you or not. And pass the word along to Inter-American and Fleischer to be on the lookout for her. I owe them a couple of favors, anyhow. And whatever you do, don’t forget about Mrs. Donaldson. Tell her I’ll be there at seven on the dot.”

  It was a long ride out to Coney Island, and when Murray left the cab he had the feeling of having arrived in the middle of a ghost town. On his few previous excursions to the place it had been brightly lit, loud with the thunder of scenic railways, and jammed with people who moved in a sluggish current along the outside of the sidewalks, making their way past the hungry ones who were packed in front of the concessions. Now the concessions were boarded up, the scenic railways were desolate skeletons, and the only sign of life was a faraway sound of carrousel music, the merest tinkling of music, carried along the avenue by the wet salt wind which blew steadily from the beach. Some optimist was making a pitch for the last customer of the year, and it had an uncanny quality in that damp, gray desert.

  The boarding house was as gray and shabby and lifeless as everything around it. It was a huge barn of a place, evidently built at a time when cupolas and fancy wooden trim were the latest things. A sagging porch ran entirely around the house, and when Murray crossed it to ring the doorbell the boards underfoot creaked at every step.