Cat of Many Tails

13

Seligmann said, “Let us expose Fate, whose other name is Bauer.” He bellowed, “Elsa!”

Frau Bauer appeared, pure jinni.

“Elsa—” began the old man.

But Frau Bauer interrupted, stumbling from a secure “Herr Professor” into uncertain English so that Ellery knew her remarks were intended for his ears also. “You have breakfast eaten when it is already lunch. Lunch you have not eaten. Now comes your time to rest.” Fists on bony hips, Frau Bauer glared challenge to the non-Viennese world.

“I’m so very sorry, Professor—”

“For what, Mr. Queen? Elsa.” The old man spoke gently, in German. “You’ve listened at the door. You’ve insulted my guest. Now you wish to rob me of my few remaining hours of consciousness. Must I hypnotize you?”

Frau Bauer whitened. She fled.

“It is my only weapon against her,” chuckled the old man. “I threaten to put her under hypnosis and send her into the Soviet zone to serve as the plaything of Moscow. It is not a matter of morals with Elsa; it is sheer horror. She would as soon get in bed with the Antichrist. You were telling me, Mr. Queen, that Cazalis is innocent after all?”

“Yes.”

The old man sat back, smiling. “Do you arrive at this conclusion by way of your unique scientifically unknown method of analysis, or is it based upon fact? Such fact as would, for example, satisfy your courts of law.”

“It’s based on a fact which would satisfy anyone above the mental age of five, Professor Seligmann,” Ellery retorted. “Its very simplicity, I think, has obscured it. Its simplicity and the fact that the murders have been so numerous and have dragged on for so long. Too, it’s been the kind of case in which the individuality of the victims has tended to blur and blend as the murders multiplied, until at the end one looked back on a homogeneous pile of carcasses, so many head of cattle passed through the slaughter pen. The same sort of reaction one got looking at the official pictures of the corpses of Belsen, Buchenwald, Oswiecim, and Maidanek. No particularity. Just death.”

“But the fact, Mr. Queen.” With a flick of impatience, and something else. And suddenly Ellery recalled that Béla Seligmann’s only daughter, married to a Polish Jewish doctor, had died at Treblinka. Love particularizes death, Ellery thought. And little else.

“Oh, the fact,” he said. “Why, it’s a mere matter of beginners’ physics, Professor. You attended the Zürich convention earlier this year, you told me. Exactly when this year?”

The white brows met. “The end of May, was it not?”

“The meeting lasted ten days and the concluding session was held on the night of June 3. On the night of June 3 Dr. Edward Cazalis of the United States read a paper entitled Ochlophobia, Nyctophobia, and Ponophobia in the convention hall before a large audience. As reported in a Zürcher scientific journal, the speaker scheduled to precede Cazalis, a Dane, ran far over his allotted time, to virtually the adjournment hour. Out of courtesy to Dr. Cazalis, however, who had attended all the sessions — according to a footnote in the journal — the American was permitted to deliver his paper. Cazalis began reading around midnight and finished at a few minutes past 2 o’clock in the morning. The convention was then adjourned for the year. The official adjournment time was 2:24 A.M. 4th June.”

Ellery shrugged. “The time difference between Zürich and New York being six hours, midnight of June 3 in Zürich, which is when Cazalis began reading his paper to the convention, was 6 P.M. June 3 in New York; 2 A.M. June 4 in Zurich, which is about when Cazalis finished reading his paper there, was 8 P.M. June 3 in New York. Assuming the absurd — that Cazalis whisked himself from the convention hall immediately on adjournment or even as he stepped off the platform at the conclusion of his talk, that he had already checked out of his hotel and had his luggage waiting, that the slight matter of his visa had been taken care of, that there was a plane ready to take off for the United States at the Zürich airport the instant he reached there (for which specific plane Cazalis had a ticket, notwithstanding Dr. Naardvoessler’s windiness, the unusual hour, or the impossibility of having foreseen the delay), that this plane flew to New York nonstop, that at Newark Airport or La Guardia Cazalis found a police motorcycle escort waiting to conduct his taxi through traffic at the highest possible speed — assuming all this nonsense, Herr Professor, at which hour could Edward Cazalis have reached midtown Manhattan, would you say? The earliest conceivable hour?”

“I have a poor acquaintance with the progress — if that is the word — of aeronautics.”

“Could the entire leap through space — from a platform in Zurich to a street in Manhattan — have been accomplished in three and a half to four hours, Professor Seligmann?”

“Obviously not.”

“So I telephoned to you. Whereupon it came out that Edward Cazalis did not go from the convention hall to an airfield that night. Came but not as speculation but as fact. For you told me you had kept Cazalis up talking in your hotel room in Zürich all through that night until ‘long past dawn.’ Surely that would mean, at the very earliest, 6 A.M.? Let’s say 6 A.M., Professor, to please me; it must have been, of course, even later. 6 A.M. in Zurich on the 4th of June would be midnight in New York on June 3. Do you recall my giving you the date of the first Cat murder? The murder of the man named Abernethy?”

“Dates are a nuisance. And there were so many.”

“Exactly. There were so many, and it was so long ago. Well, according to our Medical Examiner’s report, Abernethy was strangled ‘around midnight’ of June 3. As I said, a matter of simple physics. Cazalis has demonstrated many talents, but the ability to be in two places thousands of miles apart at the same moment is not one of them.”

The old man exclaimed, “But, as you say, this is so basic! And your police, your prosecutors, have not perceived this physical impossibility?”

“There were nine murders and an attempted tenth. The time-stretch was almost exactly five months. Cazalis’s old obstetrical files, the strangling cords hidden in his psychiatric case history files, the circumstances of his capture, his detailed and voluntary confession — all these have created an over-whelming presumption of his guilt. The authorities may have slipped through overconfidence, or carelessness, or because they found that in the majority of the murders Cazalis could physically have committed the crimes. Remember, there is no direct evidence linking Cazalis with any of the murders; the people’s entire case must rest on that tenth attempt. Here the evidence is direct enough. Cazalis was captured while he was in the act of tightening the noose about the throat of the girl who was wearing Marilyn Soames’s borrowed coat. The noose of tussah silk. The Cat’s noose. Ergo, he’s the Cat. Why think of alibis?

“On the other hand, one would expect the defense attorneys to check everything. If they haven’t turned up Cazalis’s alibi, it’s because of the defendant himself; when I left New York, he was being extremely difficult. After attempting to get along without legal help altogether. And then there’s no reason why a lawyer, merely because he is a lawyer for the defense, should be immune to the general atmosphere of conviction about his client’s guilt.

“I suspect, however, a more insidious reason for the alibi’s remaining undiscovered, one that goes to the roots of the psychology which has operated in this case virtually from its outset. There has been a neurotic anxiety of epidemic proportions to catch the Cat, drive a stake through his heart, and forget the whole dreadful mass incubus. It’s infected the authorities, too. The Cat was a Doppelgänger, his nature so tenuously drawn that when the authorities actually laid their hands on a creature of flesh and blood who fitted the specifications...”

“If you instruct me whom to address, Mr. Queen,” rumbled old Seligmann, “I shall cable New York of my having detained Cazalis all night until past dawn of the 4th June in Zürich.”

“We’ll arrange for you to make a formal deposition. That, plus the evidence of Dr. Cazalis’s attendance throughout the Zürich convention and of his return passage to the United States, which can’t have begun earlier than June 4, will clear him.”

“They will be satisfied that, having been unable physically to murder the first one, Cazalis did not murder the others?”

“To argue the contrary would be infantile, Professor Seligmann. The crimes were characterized and accepted as the work of the same individual almost from the beginning. And with abundant reason. The source of the supply of victims’ names alone confirms it. The method used in selecting the specific victims from the source of supply confirms it. The identical technique of the strangulations confirms it. And so on. The strongest point of all is the use in all nine murders of the strangling cords of tussah silk — cords of East Indian origin, exotic, unusual, not readily procurable, and obviously from the same source.”

“And, of course, in a sequence of acts of violence of a psychotic nature showing common characteristics—”

“Yes. Multiple homicides of this kind are invariably what we call ‘lone wolf operations,’ acts of a single disturbed person. There won’t be any trouble on that score... Are you sure you wouldn’t like to rest now, Professor Seligmann? Frau Bauer said—”

The old man dismissed Frau Bauer with a scowl as he reached for a tobacco jar. “I begin to glimpse your destination, mein Herr. Nevertheless, take me by the hand. You have resolved one difficulty only to be confronted by another.

“Cazalis is not the Cat.

“Then who is?”

“The next question,” nodded Ellery.

He was silent for a moment.

“I answered it between heaven and earth, Professor,” he said at last with a smile, “in a state of all but suspended animation, so you’ll forgive me if I go slowly.

“To arrive at the answer we must examine Cazalis’s known acts in the light of what we’ve built up about his neurosis.

“Just what was it Cazalis did? His known activities in the Cat cases begin with the tenth victim. His very choice of 21-year-old Marilyn Soames as the tenth victim must have arisen from his application of the same selective technique employed by the Cat in hunting through Cazalis’s old obstetrical case cards — I used the technique myself and arrived at the same victim. Anyone of reasonable intelligence could have done it, then, who had access to both the facts of the preceding nine crimes and the files.

“Having employed the Cat’s method in selecting the next victim in the series, what did Cazalis then proceed to do?

“As it happened, Marilyn Soames works at home, she was extremely busy, and she didn’t regularly come out into the streets. The Cat’s first problem in each case must have been to become familiar with the face and figure of the victim he had marked for destruction. Had the real Cat, then, been working on Marilyn Soames he would have attempted to lure her from her home in order to be able to study her appearance. This was precisely what Cazalis did. By a subterfuge, he lured Marilyn Soames to a crowded public place where he could ‘study’ her in ‘safety.’

“For days and nights Cazalis scouted the girl’s neighborhood and reconnoitered the building where she lives. Just as the Cat would have done. Just as the Cat must have done in the previous cases.

“While he was apparently on the prowl, Cazalis exhibited eagerness, cunning, disappointment of an extravagant nature at temporary frustrations. The kind of behavior one would have expected the unbalanced Cat to evince.

“Finally, on that climactic, October night, Cazalis waylaid a girl who resembled Marilyn Soames in height and figure and who was accidentally wearing Marilyn Soames’s coat, dragged this girl into an alley, and began to strangle her with one of the tussah silk cords associated with the Cat’s previous homicidal activities.

“And when we captured him Cazalis ‘confessed’ to being the Cat and reconstructed his ‘activities’ in the nine previous murders... including an account of the murder of Abernethy, committed when Cazalis was in Switzerland!

“Why?

“Why did Cazalis imitate the Cat?

“Why did he confess to the Cat’s crimes?”

The old man was listening intently.

“This was patently not the case of a deluded man’s identifying himself with the violent acts of another by merely claiming, as many psychotics did in those five months — every sensational crime brings people forward — to have committed the Cat’s crimes of record. No. Cazalis proved he was the Cat by thought, plan, and action; by creating a new and typical Cat crime based upon exact knowledge and a clearly painstaking study of the Cat’s habits, methods, and technique. This was not even imitation; it was a brilliant interpretation, consisting of omissions as well as of commissions. For example, on the morning when Cazalis actually entered the Soames apartment house, while he was out in the court, Marilyn Soames came downstairs to the vestibule and stood there for several minutes looking over her mail. At this moment Cazalis re-entered the hall. No one was apparently about except Cazalis and his victim; it was early morning, the street beyond was deserted. Nevertheless, at that time Cazalis made no move to attack the girl. Why? Because to have done so would have broken the consistent pattern of the Cat’s murders; those had been committed, to the last one, after dark — and this broad daylight. Such scrupulous attention to detail could not conceivably have come out of an ordinary psychotic identification. Not to mention the self-restraint exhibited.

“No, Cazalis was rational and his deliberate assumption of the Cat’s role in all its creative vigor was therefore rationally motivated.”

“It is your conclusion, then,” asked Seligmann, “that Cazalis had no intention of strangling the girl to death in the alley? That he merely made the pretense?”

“Yes.”

“But this would presuppose that he knew he was being followed by the police and that he would be captured in the act.”

“Of course he knew, Professor. The very fact that he, a rational man, set out to prove he was the Cat when he was not raises the logical question: Prove it to whom? His proof did not consist merely of a confession, as I’ve pointed out. It consisted of elaborate activities stretching over a period of many days; of facial expressions as well as of visits to the Soames neighborhood. A deception presupposes that there is someone watching to be deceived. Yes, Cazalis knew he was being followed by the police; he knew that each move he made, each twist of his lips, was being noted and recorded by trained operatives.

“And when he slipped the silk cord around Celeste Phillips’s neck — the girl he mistook for his victim — Cazalis was playing the final scene for his audience. It’s significant that the tenth case was the only case in which the intended victim was able to cry out loudly enough to be heard. And while Cazalis tightened the cord sufficiently to leave realistic marks on the girl’s neck, it’s also significant that he permitted her to get her hands between the noose and her throat, that he did not knock her unconscious as the Cat had done in at least two of his assaults, and that Celeste Phillips was able within a short time of the attack to speak and act normally; what slight and temporary damage she sustained was chiefly the result of her own struggles and her terror. What Cazalis would have done had we not run into the alley to ‘stop’ him is conjectural; probably he would have permitted the girl to scream long enough without fatal injury to insure interference from some outside source. He could be certain detectives weren’t far away in the fog, and it was a congested section of the City.

“He wanted to be caught in the act of a Cat murder-attempt, he planned to be caught in the act of a Cat murder-attempt, and he was successful in being caught in the act of a Cat murder-attempt.”

“Whereupon it becomes evident,” murmured the old man, “that we approach our destination.”

“Yes. For a rational man to assume another’s guilt and to be willing to suffer another’s punishment, the rational mind can find only one justification: the one is shielding the other.

“Cazalis was concealing the Cat’s identity.

“Cazalis was protecting the Cat from detection, exposure, and punishment.

“And in doing so Cazalis was punishing himself out of deeply buried feelings of his own guilts as they centered about the Cat and his emotional involvement with the Cat.

“Do you agree, Professor Seligmann?”

But the old man said in a curious way: “I am only an observer along this road you travel, Mr. Queen. I neither agree nor disagree; I listen.”

Ellery laughed. “What did I now know about the Cat?

“That the Cat was someone with whom Cazalis was emotionally involved. With whom he was therefore in a close relationship.

“That the Cat was someone whom Cazalis had an overpowering wish to protect and whose criminal guilt is tied in Cazalis’s mind to his own neurotic guilts.

“That the Cat was a psychotic with a determinable psychotic reason for seeking out and murdering people who a generation and more before had been brought into the world by Cazalis the obstetrician.

“That, finally, the Cat was someone who has had equal access with Cazalis to his old obstetrical records, which have been stored in a locked closet in his home.”

Seligmann paused in the act of putting the meerschaum back into his mouth.

“Is there such a person, I asked myself? To my certain knowledge?

“There is. To my certain knowledge,” said Ellery. “Just one.

“Mrs. Cazalis.”

“For Mrs. Cazalis,” said Ellery, “is the only living person who fits the specifications I have just drawn.

“Mrs. Cazalis is the only living person with whom Cazalis is emotionally involved in a close relationship; in his closest relationship.

“Mrs. Cazalis is the only living person whom Cazalis would have a compulsion to protect and for whose guilt Cazalis would feel intensely responsible... whose criminal guilt would be tied in his mind to his own neurotic guilt feelings.

“Mrs. Cazalis has a determinable — the only determinable — psychotic reason for seeking out and murdering people her husband had brought into the world.

“And that Mrs. Cazalis has had equal access with her husband to his obstetrical records is self-evident.”

Seligmann did not change expression. He seemed neither surprised nor impressed. “I am chiefly interested in pursuing your third point. What you have called Mrs. Cazalis’s ‘determinable psychotic reason’ for murdering. How do you demonstrate this?”

“By another extension of that method of mine you’ve characterized as unknown to science, Herr Professor. I knew that Mrs. Cazalis had lost two children in giving birth. I knew, from something Cazalis told me, that after the second delivery she was no longer able to bear children. I knew that she had thereafter become extremely attached to her sister’s only child, Lenore Richardson, to the point where her niece was more her daughter than her sister’s. I knew, or I had convinced myself, that Cazalis had proved inadequate to his sexual function as a husband. Certainly during the long period of his breakdowns and subsequent treatment he must have been a source of continual frustration to his wife. And she was only 19 when they married.

“From the age of 19, then,” said Ellery, “I saw Mrs. Cazalis as leading an unnatural, tense existence, complicated by strong maternal desires which were thwarted by the deaths of her two infants, her inability to have another child, and what could only have been a highly unsatisfactory and unsettling transference of her thwarted feelings to her niece. She knew that Lenore could never really be hers; Lenore’s mother is neurotic, jealous, possessive, infantile, and interfering — a source of unending trouble. Mrs. Cazalis is not an outgoing individual and apparently she never was. Her frustrations, then, grew inward; she contained them... for a long time.

“Until, in fact, she was past 40.

“Then she cracked.

“I say, Professor Seligmann, that one day Mrs. Cazalis told herself something that thenceforward became her only reason for living.

“Once she believed that, she was lost. Lost in the distorted world of psychosis.

“Because, Professor, I believe the oddest thing occurred. Mrs. Cazalis did not have to know that her husband thought he had murdered their children at birth; in fact, she undoubtedly did not know it — in her rational life — or their marriage would hardly have survived the knowledge for so many years. But I think she arrived at approximately the same point in her psychosis.

“I think she finally told herself: My husband gave thousands of living babies to other women, but when I was to have my own babies he gave me dead ones. So my husband killed them. He won’t let me have my children, so I won’t let them have their children. He killed mine; I’ll kill theirs.” And Ellery said, “Would it be possible for me to have more of that wonderful non-Viennese coffee, Professor Seligmann?”

“Ach.” Seligmann reached over and tugged at a bellpull. Frau Bauer appeared. “Elsa, are we barbarians? More coffee.”

“It’s all ready,” snapped Frau Bauer in German. And as she returned with two fat, steaming pots and fresh cups and saucers, she said, “I know you, you old Schuft. You are in one of your suicidal moods.” And she flounced out, banging the door.

“This is my life,” said the old man. He was regarding Ellery with bright eyes. “Do you know, Herr Queen, this is extraordinary. I can only sit and admire.”

“Yes?” said Ellery, not quite following but grateful for the gift of the jinni.

“For you have arrived, by an uncharted route, at the true destination.

“The trained eye looks upon your Mrs. Cazalis and one says: Here is a quiet, submissive type of woman. She is withdrawn, seclusive, asocial, frigid, slightly suspicious and hypercritical — I speak, of course, of the time when I knew her. Her husband is handsome, successful, and in his work — his obstetrical work — he is constantly in contact with other women, but in their married life her husband and she have disturbing conflicts and tensions. She has managed nevertheless to make an adjustment to life; in — as it were — a limping fashion.

“She has done nothing to warrant special notice. In fact, she has always been overshadowed by her husband and dominated by him.

“Then, in her 40s, something occurs. For years, secretly, she has been jealous of her husband’s rapport with younger women, his psychiatric patients — for it is interesting to note that in recent years, as Cazalis told me in Zürich, he has had an almost totally female clientele. She has not required ‘proof,’ for she has always been of a schizoid tendency; besides, there was probably nothing to ‘prove.’ No matter. Mrs. Cazalis’s schizoid tendency bursts forth in a delusional state.

“A frank paranoid psychosis.

“She develops the delusion that her own babies were killed by her husband. In order to deprive her of them. She may even think that he is the father of some of the children whose successful deliveries he performed. With or without the idea that her husband is their father, she sets out to kill them in retaliation.

“Her psychosis is controlled in her inner life. It is not expressed to the world except in her crimes.

“This is how the psychiatrist might describe the murderer you have delineated.

“As you see, Mr. Queen, the destination is the same.”

“Except that mine,” said Ellery, his smile slightly bitter, “seems to have been approached poetically. I recall the artist who kept depicting the stranger as a cat and I warm to his remarkable intuition. Doesn’t a tigress — that grandmother of cats — go ‘mad’ with rage when she is robbed of her cubs? Then, Professor, there’s the old saying, A woman hath nine lives like a cat. Mrs. Cazalis has nine lives to her debit, too. She killed and she killed until...”

“Yes?”

“Until one day Cazalis entertained a ghastly visitor.”

“The truth.”

Ellery nodded. “It could have come about in one of a number of ways. He might have stumbled on the hiding place of her stock of silk cords and recalled their visit to India years before and her purchase — not his — of the cords. Or perhaps it was one or two of the victims’ names striking a chord of memory; then it would require merely a few minutes with his old files to open his eyes. Or he may have noticed his wife acting oddly, followed her, and was too late to avert a tragedy but in quite sufficient time to grasp its sickening significance. He would go back in his mind to the recent past and discover that on the night of each murder he could not vouch for her whereabouts. Also, Cazalis suffers from chronic insomnia and he takes sleeping pills regularly; this, he would realize, had given her unlimited opportunities. And for purposes of slipping in and out of the building at night unobserved by the apartment house employees, there was always Cazalis’s office door, giving access directly to the street. As for the daytimes, a woman’s daytime excursions are rarely examined by her husband; in our American culture, in all strata, ‘shopping’ is the magic word, explaining everything... Cazalis may even have seen how, in the cunning of her paranoia, his wife had skipped over numerous eligibles on the list in order to strike at her niece — the most terrible of her murders, the murder of the unsatisfying substitute for her dead children — in order that she might maneuver Cazalis into the investigation and through him keep informed as to everything the police and I knew and planned.

“In any event, as a psychiatrist Cazalis would immediately grasp the umbilical symbolism in her choice of cords to strangle — as it were — babies; certainly the infantile significance of her consistent use of blue cords for male victims and pink cords for females could not have escaped him. He could trace her psychosis, then, to the traumatic source upon which her delusion had seized. It could only be the delivery room in which she had lost her own two children. Under ordinary circumstances this would have been a merely clinical, if personally agonizing, observation, and Cazalis would either have taken the medical and legal steps usual in such cases or, if the prospect of revealing the truth to the world involved too much pain, mortification, and obloquy, he would at the least have put her where she could do no more harm.

“But the circumstances were not ordinary. There were his own old feelings of guilt which had expressed themselves through and revolved about that same delivery room. Perhaps it was the shock of realizing what lay behind his wife’s mental illness that revived the guilt feelings he had thought were dissolved. However it came about, Cazalis must have found himself in the clutch of his old neurosis, its tenacity increased a thousandfold by the shock of the discovery that had brought it alive again. Soon he was persuaded by his neurosis that it was all his fault; that had he not ‘murdered’ their two babies she would not have erupted into psychosis. The sin, then, was his; he alone was ‘responsible,’ therefore he alone must suffer the punishment.

“So he sent his wife south in the care of her sister and brother-in-law, he took the remaining silk cords from his wife’s hiding place and stored them in a place identifiable with him alone, and he set about proving to the authorities that he, Edward Cazalis, was the monster the City of New York had been hunting frantically for five months. His subsequent ‘confession’ in detail was the easiest part of it by far; he was fully informed through his affiliation with the case of all the facts known to the police, and upon a foundation of these facts he was able to build a plausible, convincing structure. How much of his behavior at this point and since has been playacting and how much actual disturbance I can’t, of course, venture to say.

“And that, Professor Seligmann, is my story,” said Ellery in a tightened voice, “and if you have any information that controverts in, this is the time to speak out.”

He found that he was shivering and he blamed it on the fire, which was low. It was hissing a little, as if to call attention to its plight.

Old Seligmann raised himself and devoted a few minutes to the Promethean chore of bringing warmth back to the room.

Ellery waited.

Suddenly, without turning, the old man grumbled: “Perhaps it would be wisdom, Herr Queen, to send that cable now.”

Ellery sighed.

“May I telephone instead? You can’t say much in a cable, and if I can talk to my father a great deal of time will have been saved.”

“I shall place the call for you.” The old man shuffled to his desk. As he took the telephone, he added with a twitch of humor, “My German — at least on the European side, Mr. Queen — will undoubtedly prove less expensive than yours.”

They might have been calling one of the more distant planets. They sat in silence sipping their coffee, attuned to a ring which did not come.

The day was running out and the study began to blur and lose its character.

Once Frau Bauer stormed in. Her bristling entrance startled them. But their unnatural silence and the twilight they sat in startled her. She tiptoed about, switching on lamps. Then, like a mouse, she skittered out.

Once Ellery laughed, and the old man raised his head.

“I’ve just thought of something absurd, Professor Seligmann. In the four months since I first laid eyes on her, I’ve never called her or thought of her or referred to her as anything but ‘Mrs. Cazalis.’”

“And what should you call her,” said the old man grumpily, “Ophelia?”

“I never did learn her Christian name. I don’t know it at this moment. Just Mrs. Cazalis... the great man’s shadow. Yet from the night she murdered her niece she was always there. On the edges. A face in the background. Putting in an occasional — but very important — word. Making idiots of us all, including her husband. It makes one wonder, Herr Professor, what the advantages are of so-called sanity.”

He laughed again to indicate that this was pleasantry, a sociable introduction to conversation; he was feeling uneasy.

But the old man merely grunted.

After that, they resumed their silences.

Until the telephone rang.

The line was miraculously clear.

“Ellery!” Inspector Queen’s shout spurned the terrestrial sea. “You all right? What are you still doing in Vienna? Why haven’t I heard from you? Not even a cable.”

“Dad, I’ve got news for you.”

“News?”

“The Cat is Mrs. Cazalis.”

Ellery grinned. He felt sadistically petty.

It was very satisfactory, his father’s reaction. “Mrs. Cazalis. Mrs. Cazalis?”

Still, there was something peculiar about the way the Inspector said it.

“I know it’s a blow, and I can’t explain now, but—”

“Son, I have news for you.”

“News for me?”

“Mrs. Cazalis is dead. She took poison this morning.”

Ellery heard himself saying to Professor Seligmann: “Mrs. Cazalis is dead. She took poison. This morning.”

“Ellery, who are you talking to?”

“Béla Seligmann. I’m at his home.” Ellery took hold of himself. For some reason it was a shock. “Maybe it’s just as well. It certainly solves a painful problem for Cazalis—”

“Yes,” said his father in a very peculiar tone indeed.

“—because, Dad, Cazalis is innocent. But I’ll give you the details when I get home. Meanwhile, you’d better start the ball rolling with the District Attorney. I know we can’t keep the trial from getting under way tomorrow morning, but—”

“Ellery.”

“What?”

“Cazalis is dead, too. He also took poison this morning.”

Cazalis is dead, too. He also took poison this morning. Ellery thought he was thinking it, but when he saw the look on Seligmann’s face he realized with astonishment that he had repeated these words of his father’s aloud, too.

“We have reason to believe it was Cazalis who planned it, told her just where to get the stuff, what to do. She’s been in something of a fog for some time. They weren’t alone in his cell more than a minute or so when it happened. She brought him the poison and they both swallowed a lethal dose at the same time. It was a quick-acting poison; before the cell door could be unlocked they were writhing, and they died within six minutes. It happened so blasted fast Cazalis’s lawyer, who was standing...”

His father’s voice dribbled off into the blue. Or seemed to. Ellery felt himself straining to catch remote accents. Not really straining to catch anything. Except a misty, hard-cored something — something he had never realized was part of him — and now that he was conscious of it it was dwindling away with the speed of light and he was powerless to hold on to it.

“Herr Queen. Mr. Queen!”

Good old Seligmann. He understands. That’s why he sounds so excited.

“Ellery, you still there? Can’t you hear me? I can’t get a thing out of this goddam—”

A voice said, “I’ll be home soon, goodbye,” and somebody dropped the phone. Ellery found everything calmly confusing. There was a great deal of noise, and Frau Bauer was in it somewhere and then she wasn’t, and a man was sniveling like a fool close by while his face was hit by a blockbuster and burning lava tore down his gullet; and then Ellery opened his eyes to find himself lying on a black leather couch and Professor Seligmann hovering over him like the spirit of all grandfathers with a bottle of cognac in one hand and a handkerchief in the other with which he was gently wiping Ellery’s face.

“It is nothing, nothing,” the old man was saying in a wonderfully soothing voice. “The long and physically depleting journey, the lack of sleep, the nervous excitements of our talk — the shock of your father’s news. Relax, Mr. Queen. Lean back. Do not think. Close your eyes.”

Ellery leaned back, and he did not think, and he closed his eyes, but then he opened them and said, “No.”

“There is more? Perhaps you would like to tell me.”

He had such a fantastically strong, safe voice, this old man.

“I’m too late again,” Ellery heard himself saying in the most ridiculously emotional voice. “I’ve killed Cazalis the way I killed Howard Van Horn. If I’d checked Cazalis against all nine murders immediately instead of resting on my shiny little laurels Cazalis would be alive today. Alive instead of dead, Professor Seligmann. Do you see? I’m too late again.”

The grandfatherly voice said, “Who is being neurotic now, mein Herr?” and now it was not gentle, it was juridical. But it was still safe.

“I swore after the Van Horn business I’d never gamble with human lives again. And then I broke the vow. I must have been really bitched up when I did that, Professor. My bitchery must be organic. I broke the vow and here I sit, over the grave of my second victim. What’s the man saying? How do I know how many other poor innocents have gone to a decenter reward because of my exquisite bitchery? I had a long and honorable career indulging my paranoia. Talk about delusions of grandeur! I’ve given pronunciamentos on law to lawyers, on chemistry to chemists, on ballistics to ballistic experts, on fingerprints of men who’ve made the study of fingerprints their lifework. I’ve issued my imperial decrees on criminal investigation methods to police officers with thirty years’ training, delivered definitive psychiatric analyses for the benefit of qualified psychiatrists. I’ve made Napoleon look like a men’s room attendant. And all the while I’ve been running amok among the innocent like Gabriel on a bender.”

“This in itself,” came the voice, “this that you say now is a delusion.”

“Proves my point, doesn’t it?” And Ellery heard himself laughing in a really revolting way. “My philosophy has been as flexible and as rational as the Queen’s in Alice. You know Alice, Herr Professor? Surely you or somebody’s psychoanalyzed it. A great work of humblification, encompassing all the wisdom of man since he learned to laugh at himself. In it you’ll find everything, even me. The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small, you’ll remember. ‘Off with his head!’”

And the fellow was standing. He had actually jumped off the couch as if Seligmann had given him the hotfoot and there he was, waving his arms at the famous old man threateningly.

“All right! All right. I’m really through this time. I’ll turn my bitchery into less lethal channels. I’m finished, Herr Professor Seligmann. A glorious career of Schlamperei masquerading as exact and omnipotent science has just been packed away forever without benefit of mothballs. Do I convey meaning? Have I made myself utterly clear?”

He felt himself seized, and held, by the eyes.

“Sit down, mein Herr. It is a strain on my back to be forced to look up at you in this way.”

Ellery heard the fellow mutter an apology and the next thing he knew he was in the chair, staring at the corpses of innumerable cups of coffee.

“I do not know this Van Horn that you mention, Mr. Queen, but it is apparent that his death has upset you, so deeply that you find yourself unable to make the simple adjustment to the death of Cazalis which is all that the facts of the case require.

“You are not thinking with the clarity of which you are capable, mein Herr.

“There is no rational justification,” the deliberate voice went on, “for your overemotional reaction to the news of Cazalis’s suicide. Nothing that you could have done would have prevented it. This I say out of a greater knowledge of such matters than you possess.”

Ellery began to assemble a face somewhere before him. It was reassuring and he sat still, dutifully.

“Had you discovered the truth within ten minutes of the moment when you first engaged to investigate the murders, the result for Cazalis would have been, I am afraid, identical. Let us say that you were enabled to demonstrate at once that Mrs. Cazalis was the psychotic murderer of so many innocent persons. She would have been arrested, tried, convicted, and disposed of according to whether your laws admitted of her psychosis or held that she was mentally responsible within the legal definition, which is often absurd. You would have done your work successfully and you would have had no reason to reproach yourself; the truth is the truth and a dangerous person would have been removed from the society which she had so greatly injured.

“I ask you now to consider: Would Cazalis have felt less responsible, would his feelings of guilt have been less pronounced, if his wife had been apprehended and disposed of?

“No. Cazalis’s guilt feelings would have been equally active, and in the end he would have taken his own life as he has done. Suicide is one of the extremes of aggressive expression and it is sought out at one of the extremes of self-hate. Do not burden yourself, young man, with a responsibility which has not been yours at any time and which you personally, under any circumstances, could not have controlled. So far as your power to have altered events is concerned, the principal difference between what has happened and what might have happened is that Cazalis died in a prison cell rather than on the excellently carpeted floor of his Park Avenue office.”

Professor Seligmann was a whole man now, very clear and close.

“No matter what you say, Professor, or how you say it, the fact remains that I was taken in by Cazalis’s deception until it was too late to do more than hold a verbal post-mortem with you here in Vienna. I did fail, Professor Seligmann.”

“In that sense — yes, Mr. Queen, you failed.” The old man leaned forward suddenly and he took one of Ellery’s hands in his own. And at his touch Ellery knew that he had come to the end of a road which he would never again have to traverse. “You have failed before, you will fail again. This is the nature and the role of man.

“The work you have chosen to do is a sublimation, of great social value.

“You must continue.

“I will tell you something else: This is as vital to you as it is to society.

“But while you are doing this important and rewarding work, Mr. Queen, I ask you to keep in mind always a great and true lesson. A truer lesson than the one you believe this experience has taught you.”

“And which lesson is that, Professor Seligmann?” Ellery was very attentive.

“The lesson, mein Herr,” said the old man, patting Ellery’s hand, “that is written in the Book of Mark. There is one God; and there is none other but he.”