Cat of Many Tails

11

They heard Celeste’s shriek as they sprinted along First Avenue between 30th and 29th Streets.

A man was running toward them from the 29th Street corner waving them back wildly.

“Goldberg...”

Not on 29th Street, then. It was here, along First Avenue.

The scream gurgled. It gurgled again, like a song.

“That alley!” yelled Ellery.

It was a narrow opening between the 29th Street corner building and a block of stores. The alley was nearer to Goldberg but Jimmy McKell’s praying mantis legs got him there first.

He vanished.

A radio-patrol car tore up, its headlights splashing against the fog. Inspector Queen shouted something and the car backed and lurched to train its brights and side light on the alley entrance.

As they dashed in, Johnson and Piggot skidded around the corner with drawn guns.

Sirens began sawing away on 29th, 30th, Second Avenue.

An ambulance shot diagonally across First Avenue from Bellevue.

In the boiling fog the girl and the two men were struggling casually. Staggered: Celeste, Cazalis, Jimmy; caught in the molecular path of a slow motion projection. Celeste faced them, arched; a bow in the arms of a bowman. The fingers of both hands were at her throat defending it; they had deliberately trapped themselves between her neck and the pinkish cord encircling it. Blood sparkled on her knuckles. Behind Celeste, gripping the ends of the noose, swayed Cazalis, bare head wrenched back by Jimmy McKell’s stranglehold; the big man’s tongue was between his teeth, eyes open to the sky in a calm expressionless glare. Jimmy’s free hand was trying to claw Cazalis’s clutch loose from the cord. Jimmy’s lips were drawn back; he looked as if he were laughing.

Ellery reached them a half-step before the others.

He smashed Cazalis directly behind the left ear with his fist, inserted his arm between Jimmy and Cazalis and smacked Jimmy’s chin with the heel of his hand.

“Let go, Jimmy, let go.”

Cazalis slid to the wet concrete, his eyes still open in that curious glare. Goldberg, Young, Johnson, Piggott, one of the patrolmen, fell on him. Young kneed him; he doubled under them, screeching like a woman.

“That wasn’t necessary,” said Ellery. He kept nursing his right hand.

“I’ve got a trick knee,” said Young apologetically. “In a case like this it goes pop! like that.”

Inspector Queen said, “Open his fist. As if he were your mother. I want that cord smoking hot.”

An intern in an overcoat was kneeling by Celeste. Her hair glittered in a puddle. Jimmy cried out, lunging. Ellery caught him by the collar with his other hand.

“But she’s dead!”

“Fainted, Jimmy.”

Inspector Queen was scrutinizing the pink cord with love. It was made of thick, tough silk. Tussah.

He said, “How’s the girl, Doctor, hm?” as he eyed the noose dangling from his upheld hand.

“Neck’s lacerated some, mostly at the sides and back,” replied the ambulance doctor. “Her hands got the worst pressure. Smart little gal.”

“She looks dead, I tell you.”

“Shock. Pulse and respiration good. She’ll live to tell this to her grandchildren till it’s coming out of their ears.” Celeste moaned. “She’s on her way out of it now.”

Jimmy sat down in the wet of the alley.

The Inspector was snaking the silk cord carefully into an envelope. Ellery heard him humming “My Wild Irish Rose.”

They had Cazalis’s hands manacled behind his back. He was lying on his soaked right side with his knees drawn up, staring through Young’s big legs at an overturned trash can a few feet away. His face was dirty and gray, his eyes seemed all whites.

The Cat.

He lay in a cage whose bars were the legs of men, breathing ponderously.

The Cat.

They were taking it easy, waiting for the intern to get finished with Celeste Phillips; joking and laughing. Johnson, who disliked Goldberg, offered Goldberg a cigaret; Goldberg had lost his pack somewhere. Goldberg accepted it companionably and struck a match for Johnson, too, who said, “Thanks, Goldie.” Piggott was telling about the time — it was during a train wreck — when he had been cuffed to a homicidal maniac for fourteen solid hours: “I was so jittery I smacked him on the jaw every ten minutes to keep him quiet.” They guffawed.

Young was complaining to the patrolman, “Hell, I was on the Harlem run for six years. Up there you use your knee first and ask questions afterward. Shiv artists. The whole bastardly lot of ’em.”

“I don’t know,” said the patrolman doubtfully. “I’ve known some that were white men. You take Zilgitt.”

“What difference does it make?” Young glanced down at their prisoner. “He’s squirrel bait, anyway. Where there’s no sense there’s no feeling.”

The man lying at their feet had his mouth going a little, as if he was chewing on something.

“Hey,” said Goldberg. “What’s he doing that for?”

“Doing what?” Inspector Queen shouldered in, alarmed.

“Look at his mouth, Inspector!”

The Inspector dropped to the concrete and grasped Cazalis’s jaw.

“Watch it, Inspector,” someone laughed. “They bite.”

The mouth opened docilely. Young flashed a light into it over Inspector Queen’s shoulder.

“Nothing,” said the Inspector. “He was chewing on his tongue.”

Young said, “Maybe the Cat’s got it,” and most of them laughed again.

“Hurry it up, Doctor, will you?” said the Inspector.

“In a minute.” The intern was wrapping Celeste in a blanket; her head kept lolling.

Jimmy was trying to fend off the other ambulance man. “Scatter, scatter,” he said. “Can’t you see McKell is in conference?”

“McKell, you’ve got blood all over your mouth and chin.”

“I have?” Jimmy felt his chin looked at his fingers with surprise.

“Mister, you bit halfway through your lower lip.”

“Come onnnnn, Celeste,” crooned Jimmy. Then he yelped. The ambulance man kept working on his mouth.

It had turned colder suddenly, but no one seemed to notice. The fog was thinning rapidly. There was a star or two.

Ellery was sitting on the trash can. “My Wild Irish Rose” was going patiently in his head, like a hurdy-gurdy. Several times he tried to turn it off but it kept going.

There was another star.

The back windows of the surrounding buildings were all bright and open; it was very cheerful. Crammed with heads and shoulders. Box seats. Arena, that was it. The pit. It. They couldn’t possibly see It, but they could hope, couldn’t they? In New York, hope dwells in every eye. A dwindling old building. A sidewalk excavation. An open manhole. A traffic accident. What was it? What’s happened? Who got hit? Is it gangsters? What are they doing down there?

It didn’t matter.

The Cats in his Hell, all’s right with the world.

New York papers please copy.

“Jimmy, come here.”

“Not now.”

“Extra,” called Ellery, with significance. “Don’t you want a bonus?”

Jimmy laughed. “Didn’t I tell you? They fired me last week.”

“Get to a phone. They’ll make you editor.”

“The hell with them.”

“It’s worth a million to them.”

“I’ve got a million.”

Ellery rocked on the trash can. The screwball was really a card. Swell kid, Jimmy. Ellery laughed again, wondering why his hand felt so queer.

The third floor windows at the rear of 486 East 29th were all filled, too.

They don’t know. The name of Soames goes down in history and they’re sitting up there wondering whose name they’ll read in the papers.

“Here she is,” announced the intern. “Greetings, Miss, and may I be the first to congratulate you?”

Her bandaged hands went to her throat.

Jimmy mumbled to the other one, “Will you get the devil off my lip? Baby, it’s me. It’s all over. Fini. Jimmy, baby. Remember me?”

“Jimmy.”

“She recognizes me! All over, baby.”

“That horrible...”

“It’s all over.”

My Wiiiiiild Irish Rooooose...

“I was hurrying along First Avenue.”

“Practically a grandmother. This iodine dispenser said so.”

“He pulled me in as I passed. I saw his face and then it was dark. My neck.”

“Save it, save your strength for a little later, Miss Phillips,” said the Inspector genially.

“All over, baby.”

“The Cat. Where is he? Jimmy, where is he?”

“Now stop shaking. Lying right over there. Just an alley cat. See? Look. Don’t be afraid.”

Celeste began to cry.

“It’s all over, baby.” Jimmy had his arms around her and they rocked together in a little puddle.

Wonder where they think Celeste is. Down here “helping out,” probably. Clara Barton stuff... And is it not a battlefield? The Battle of First Avenue. After sending McKell’s Marauders out on cavalry reconnaissance, General Queen feinted with Phillips’s Corps and engaged the enemy with his Centre Str.... Ellery thought he spied the dark head of Marilyn Soames among the other heads, but then he untwisted his neck and rubbed the back of it. What was in that beer?

“Okay, Doc, okay,” the Inspector was saying. “Over here now.”

The intern stooped over Cazalis, looked up. “Who did you say this is?” he asked sharply.

“He got a hard one in the groin. I don’t want to move him till you say it’s all right.”

“This man is Dr. Edward Cazalis, the psychiatrist!”

Everybody laughed.

“Thanks, Doc,” said Detective Young, winking at the others. “We’re beholden to you.”

They laughed again.

The intern flushed. After a while he got to his feet. “Hold him up and he’ll make it. Nothing serious.”

“Upsadaisy!”

“Say, I’ll bet he was pulling a fakeroo all the time.”

“Young, you better practice up that knee action.”

“Watch him, watch him.”

He was making a strong effort to move his legs, mincing along half on his toes like a student ballet dancer, his knees not quite supporting him.

“Don’t look,” Jimmy said. “It’s not the least bit important.”

“It is. I want to. I promised my—” But then Celeste shuddered and looked away.

“Keep that street out there cleared.” The Inspector looked around. “Hold it.” The procession stopped and Cazalis seemed grateful. “Where’s Ellery?”

“Over there, Inspector.”

“Hey.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

My Wiiiiild Ir...

The trash can clattered and rolled a few feet.

“He’s hurt.”

“Doctor!”

The intern said, “He passed out. His hand is fractured. Easy...”

Easy. Easy does it, a mere five months’ worth of sniff and dig and hunt and plot — twenty-one weeks of it; to be exact, twenty-one weeks and one day, one hundred and forty-eight days from a soft rap on the door of an East 19th Street apartment to a hard smash to a man’s head in a First Avenue alley; from Abernethy, Archibald Dudley to Phillips, Celeste, alias Sue Martin, Girl Spy; from Friday, June 3, to Saturday, October 29; point four-o-four per cent of a single year in the life of the City of New York, during which period one of the City’s numerous hatchetmen cut down the population of the Borough of Manhattan by nine lives although, to be sure, there was that little matter of the Metropol Hall panic and the rioting that followed; in the sum, however, statistical chicken feed lost in Bunyan’s barnyard, and what was all the excitement about?

Easy does it.

Easy does it, for the Cat sat in a hard chair under photographic light and he was not the tails-lashing chimera of the broken metropolitan dream but a tumbledown old man with shaking hands and an anxious look, as if he wanted to please but not quite sure what was required of him. They had found a second salmon-pink cord of tussah silk on his person and at the rear of one of the locked filing cabinets in his Park Avenue office a cache of two dozen others of which more than half were dyed the remembered blue; he had instructed them where to look and he had picked out the right key for them from the assortment in his key case. He said he had had the cords for many years; since late in 1930, when he was on a tour around the world after retiring from his obstetrical practice. In India a native had sold him the cords, representing them to be old strangling cords of thuggee origin. Later, before putting them away, he had dyed them blue and pink. Why had he saved them all these years? He looked bewildered. No, his wife had never known about them; he had been alone when he purchased them in the bazaar and he had kept them hidden afterward... His head slanted readily to their questions and he answered in a courteous way, although there were stretches when he became uncommunicative or slightly erratic. But the rambling episodes were few; for the most part he caught the pertinent past in brilliant focus, sounding quite like the Dr. Cazalis they had known.

His eyes, however, remained unchanged, staring, lenslike.

Ellery, who had come there directly from Bellevue Hospital with Celeste Phillips and Jimmy McKell, sat to one side, his right hand in a splint, listening and saying nothing. He had not yet run down; he still had a feeling of unreality. The Police Commissioner and the District Attorney were also present; and at a little past 4:30 A.M. the Mayor hurried in, paler than the prisoner.

But the grimy old man in the chair seemed not to see any of them. It was a deliberate avoidance, they all felt, dictated by a kind of tact. They knew how plausible such madmen could be.

In the main, his account of the nine murders was remarkable for its detail. Barring his few lapses from clarity, which might well have resulted from pain, confusion, emotional and physical exhaustion — had they not known what he really was — his confession was excellent.

His least satisfactory reply came in response to Ellery’s only contribution to the night’s inquisition.

When the prisoner had nearly concluded, Ellery leaned forward and asked: “Dr. Cazalis, you’ve admitted that you hadn’t seen any of these people since their infancy. As individuals, therefore, they couldn’t possibly have meant anything to you. Yet obviously you had something against them. What was it? Why did you feel you had to kill them?”

Because the conduct of the psychotic appears unmotivated only when judged in the perspective of reality — that is, by more or less healthy minds viewing the world as it is...

Said Dr. Cazalis.

The prisoner twisted in his chair and looked directly at the source of Ellery’s voice, although because of the lights beating on his bruised face it was plain that he could not see beyond them.

“Is that Mr. Queen?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Mr. Queen,” said the prisoner in a friendly, almost indulgent tone, “I doubt that you’re scientifically equipped to understand.”

Sunday’s morning was full-grown when they got away from the reporters. Jimmy McKell sprawled in a corner of the taxi with Celeste in his arms and in the other corner Ellery pampered his immobilized hand, looking out the window on his side not for reasons of delicacy but because he wanted to see through it.

The City looked different this morning.

Felt, smelled, sounded different.

New.

The air had a tune in it. Maybe it was the church-bells. Churches were bellowing their wares downtown and up, East Side to west. Adeste fideles! Come and get it!

In the residential sections delicatessens, bakeries, newsstands, drugstores were busy opening.

An El train went bucketing by somewhere.

A newsboy, bluepawed.

Occasionally an early riser appeared, rubbing his hands together, walking smartly.

At taxi stands cabs stood parked. Bootleg radios going. Drivers intent.

People began collecting around them.

New York was stretching.

Waking up.