Cat of Many Tails

2

August 25 brought one of those simmering subtropical nights in which summer New York specializes. Ellery was in his study stripped to his shorts, trying to write. But his fingers kept sliding off the keys and finally he turned off his desk light and padded to a window.

The City was blackly quiet, flattened by the pressures of the night. Eastward thousands would be drifting into Central Park to throw themselves to the steamy grass. To the northeast, in Harlem and the Bronx, Little Italy, Yorkville; to the southeast, on the Lower East Side and across the river in Queens and Brooklyn; to the south, in Chelsea, Greenwich Village, Chinatown — wherever there were tenements — fire escapes would be crowded nests in the smother, houses emptied, streets full of lackadaisical people. The parkways would be bug trails. Cars would swarm over the bridges — Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, Queensborough, George Washington, Triborough — hunting a breeze. At Coney Island, Brighton, Manhattan Beach, the Rockaways, Jones Beach, the sands would be seeded by millions of the sleepless turned restlessly to the sea. The excursion boats would be scuttling up and down the Hudson and the ferries staggering like overloaded old women to Weehawken and Staten Island.

Heat lightning ripped the sky, disclosing the tower of the Empire State Building. A huge photographic process; for the shutterflash of a citysized camera taking a picture of the night.

A little to the south hung a bright spume. But it was a mirage. Times Square would be sweltering under it; the people would be in Radio City Music Hall, the Roxy, the Capitol, the Strand, the Paramount, the State — wherever there was a promise of lower temperatures.

Some would seek the subways. The coupled cars kept their connecting doors open and when the trains rushed along between stations there was a violent displacement of the tunnel air, hellish but a wind. The choice position was in the front doorway of the head car beside the motorman’s cubicle. Here the masses would be thickest, swaying in a grateful catalepsy.

In Washington Square, along Fifth Avenue, 57th Street, upper Broadway, Riverside Drive, Central Park West, 110th Street, Lexington Avenue, Madison, the busses would accept the few and spurn the many and they would rush up and down, north and south, east and west, chasing their tails like...

Ellery blundered back to his desk, lit a cigaret.

No matter where I start, he thought, I wind up in the same damned place.

That Cat’s getting to be a problem.

He tilted, embracing his neck. His fingers slithered in the universal ooze and he tightened them, thinking that he could stand an over-all tightening. Nonskid thoughts. A new lining job on the will.

The Cat.

Ellery smoked, crookedly.

A great temptation.

In the Wrightsville Van Horn case Ellery had run into stunning treachery. He had found himself betrayed by his own logic. The old blade had turned suddenly in his hand; he had aimed at the guilty with it and it had run through the innocent. So he had put it away and taken up his typewriter. As Inspector Queen said, ivory tower stuff.

Unhappily, he had to share his turret with an old knight who jousted daily with the wicked. Inspector Richard Queen of the New York Police Department being also the unhorsed champion’s sire, it was a perilous proximity.

“I don’t want to hear about a case,” Ellery would say. “Just let me be.”

“What’s the matter?” his father would jeer. “Afraid you might be tempted?”

“I’ve given all that up. I’m not interested any longer.”

But that was before the Cat strangled Archibald Dudley Abernethy.

He had tried to ignore the murder of Abernethy. And for some time he had succeeded in doing so. But the creature’s round little face with its round little eyes had an annoying way of staring out at him from his morning newspaper.

In the end he had brought himself up to date.

It was interesting, an interesting case.

He had never seen a less meaningful face. It was not vicious, or kind, or sly, or stupid; it was not even enigmatic. It was nothing, a rotundity, a 44-year-old fetus-face; one of nature’s undeveloped experiments.

Yes, an interesting homicide.

And then the second strangling.

And the third.

And...

The apartment door blupped!

“Dad?”

Ellery jumped, banging his shin. He limped hurriedly to the living room.

“Hi there.” Inspector Queen already had his jacket and necktie off; he was removing his shoes. “You look cool, son.”

The Inspector looked gray.

“Tough day?” It was not the heat. The old man was as weatherproof as a desert rat.

“Anything on the ice, Ellery?”

“Lemonade. Quarts of it.”

The Inspector shuffled into the kitchen. Ellery heard the icebox open and close. “By the way, congratulate me.”

“Congratulate you on what?”

“On being handed today,” said his father, reappearing with a frosty glass, “the biggest pig in the poke of my alleged — I say alleged — career.” He threw his head back and drank. Throat showing, he looked even grayer.

“Fired?”

“Worse.”

“Promoted.”

“Well,” said the Inspector, seating himself, “I’m now top dog in the Cat chase.”

“The Cat.”

“You know, the Cat?”

Ellery leaned against the study jamb.

“The Commissioner called me in,” said the Inspector, folding his hands about the glass, “and he told me he’d had the move under consideration for some time. He’s creating a special Cat squad. I’m in full charge. As I said, top dog.”

“Caninized.” Ellery laughed.

“Maybe you find this situation full of yuks,” said his father, “but as for me, give me liberty and lots of it.” He drained what was left in the glass. “Ellery, I damn near told the Commissioner to his face today that Dick Queen’s too old a bird to be handed a deal like this. I’ve given the P.D. a pretty full lifetime of faithful service. I deserve better.”

“But you took it.”

“Yes, I took it,” said the Inspector, “and God help me, I even said, ‘Thanks, Commissioner.’ And then I got the feeling,” he went on in a worried way, “that he had some angle he wasn’t putting on the line and son, I wanted to duck out even more. I can still do it.”

“You talking about quitting?”

“Well, I’m just talking. Anyway, you can’t say you don’t come by it honestly.”

“Ourrrrch.” Ellery went to one of the living room windows. “But it’s not my brawl,” he complained to New York. “I played around a little, that’s all. For a long time I was lucky. But when I found out I was using loaded dice—”

“I see your point. Yes. And this crap game’s for keeps.”

Ellery turned around. “Aren’t you exaggerating?”

“Ellery, this is an emergency.”

“Oh, come.”

“I said,” said the old man, “an emergency.”

“A few murders. Granted they’re puzzling. That’s hardly a new twist. What’s the percentage of unsolved homicides? I don’t understand you, Dad. I had a reason for quitting; I’d taken on something and I flubbed it, causing a death or two by the way. But you’re a pro. This is an assignment. The responsibility for failure, if you fail, is the Commissioner’s. And suppose these stranglings aren’t solved—”

“My dear philosopher,” said the Inspector, rolling the empty glass between his palms, “if these stranglings aren’t solved, and damned quickly, something’s going to pop in this man’s town.”

“Pop? In New York? How do you mean?”

“It hasn’t really got going yet. Just signs. The number of phone calls to Headquarters asking for information, instructions, reassurance, anything. The increase in false alarm police calls, especially at night. The jitters of the men on duty. A little more all-around tension than there ought to be. A...” the Inspector groped with his glass... “a sort of concentration of interest on the part of the public. They’re too interested. It isn’t natural.”

“Just because an overheated cartoonist—”

“Just because! Who cares a hoot in Hell Gate what’s caused it? It’s on its way, Ellery. Why is the only smash hit on Broadway this summer that ridiculous murder farce, The Cat? Every critic in town panned it as the smelliest piece of rat cheese to hit New York in five years, and it’s the only show doing business. Winchell’s latest is ‘Cat-Astrophes.’ Berle turned down a cat joke, said he didn’t think the subject was funny. The pet shops report they haven’t sold a kitten in a month. They’re beginning to see the Cat in Riverdale, Canarsie, Greenpoint, the East Bronx, Park Row, Park Avenue, Park Plaza. We’re starting to find alley cats strangled with cords all over the city. Forsythe Street. Pitkin Avenue. Lenox. Second. Tenth. Bruckner Boulevard—”

“Kids.”

“Sure, we’ve even caught some of them at it. But it’s a symptom, Ellery. A symptom of something that scares the stiffener out of me, and I’m man enough to admit it.”

“Have you eaten anything today?”

“Five murders and the biggest city in the world gets the shakes! Why? How do you explain it?”

Ellery was silent.

“Come on,” said the Inspector sarcastically. “You won’t endanger your amateur standing.”

But Ellery was only thinking. “Maybe,” he said, “maybe it’s the strange feel of it. New York will take fifty polio cases a day in its stride, but let two cases of Asiatic cholera break out and under the right conditions you might have mass hysteria. There’s something alien about these stranglings. They make indifference impossible. When a man like Abernethy can get it, anyone can get it.” He stopped. The Inspector was staring at him. “You seem to know a lot about it.”

“Just what I’ve happened to catch in the papers.”

“Like to know more? Worm’s eye view?”

“Well...”

“Sit down, son.”

“Dad—”

“Sit down!”

Ellery sat down. After all, the man was his father.

“Five murders so far,” said the Inspector. “All in Manhattan. All stranglings. Same kind of cord used in each.”

“That tussah silk number? Indian silk?”

“Oh, you know that.”

“The papers say you’ve got nowhere trying to trace them.”

“The papers are correct. It’s a strong, coarse-fibered silk of — so help me — Indian jungle origin, and it’s the only clue we have.

“What?”

“I repeat: not a single cursed other clue. Nothing! Nothing, Ellery. No prints. No witnesses. No suspects. No motives. There isn’t a thing to work on. The killer comes and goes like a breeze, leaving only two things behind, a corpse and a cord. The first victim was—”

“Abernethy, Archibald Dudley. Aged 44. Three-room apartment on East 19th Street near Gramercy Park. A bachelor left alone by the death of his invalid mother a few years ago. His father, a clergyman, died in 1922. Abernethy never worked a lick in his life. Took care of mama and afterward of himself. 4-F in the war. Did his own cooking, housekeeping. No apparent interests. No entangling alliances. No anything. A colorless, juiceless nonentity. Has the time of Abernethy’s death been fixed more accurately?”

“Doc Prouty is pretty well satisfied he was strangled around midnight of June 3. We have reason to believe Abernethy knew the killer; the whole setup smacked of an appointment. We’ve eliminated relatives; they’re scattered to hell and gone and none of them could have done it. Friends? Abernethy didn’t have any, not one. He was the original lone wolf.”

“Or sheep.”

“As far as I can see, we didn’t miss a trick,” said the Inspector morosely. “We checked the super of the building. We checked a drunk janitor. Every tenant in the house. Even the renting agent.”

“I understand Abernethy lived off the income from a trust—”

“Handled by a bank for umpty years. He had no lawyer. He had no business — how he occupied his time since his mother’s death God only knows; we don’t. Just vegetated, I guess.”

“Tradesmen?”

“All checked off.”

“Barber, too?”

“You mean from the killer’s getting behind his sweet petit point chair?” The Inspector did not smile. “He shaved himself. Once a month he got a haircut in a shop off Union Square. He’d gone there for over twenty years and they didn’t even know his name. Just the same we checked the three barbers. And no dice.”

“You’re convinced there was no woman in Abernethy’s life?”

“Positive.”

“And no man?”

“No evidence that he was even a homo. He was a small fat skunk egg. No hits, no runs, no errors.”

“One error. At least one.” Inspector Queen started, but then his lips tightened. Ellery sloshed a little in his chair. “No man can be the total blank the facts make out Abernethy to have been. It’s just not possible. And the proof that it’s not is that he was murdered. He had a feeble life of some sort. He did something. All five of them did. What about Violette Smith?”

“Violette Smith,” said the Inspector, closing his eyes. “Number 2 on the Cat’s hit parade. Strangled just nineteen days after Abernethy — date, June 22, sometime between 6 P.M. and midnight. Unmarried. 42. Lived alone in a two-room apartment on the top floor of a bug trap on West 44th, over a pizzeria. Side entrance, walkup. Three other tenants in the building besides the restaurant downstairs. Had lived at that address six years. Before that on 73rd and West End Avenue. Before that on Cherry Street in the Village, where she’d been born.

“Violette Smith,” said the Inspector without opening his eyes, “was the opposite of Archie Abernethy in just about every conceivable way. He was a hermit, she knew everybody around Times Square. He was a babe in the woods, she was a she-wolf. He’d been protected by mama all his life, the only protection she knew was the kind she had to pay. Abernethy had no vices, Violette had no virtues. She was a dipso, a reefer addict, and she’d just graduated to the hard stuff when she got hers. He never earned a penny in his life, she made her living the hard way.”

“Sixth Avenue mostly, I gather,” said Ellery.

“Not true. Violette never worked the pavements. Her hustling was on call; she had a mighty busy phone.

“Whereas in Abernethy’s case,” the Inspector droned on, “we had nothing to work on, in Violette’s we hit the jackpot. Normally, when a woman like her gets knocked off, you check the agent, the girl friends, the clients, the dope peddler, the mobster who’s always in the background somewhere — and somewhere along the line you hit the answer. Well, this setup was normal enough; Vi had a record of nine arrests, she’d done some time, she was tied up with Frank Pompo, all the rest of it. Only nothing got anywhere.”

“Are you sure—”

“—it was a Cat job? As a matter of fact, at first we weren’t. If not for the use of the cord—”

“Same Indian silk.”

“The color was different. Pinkish, a salmony kind of color. But the silk was that tussah stuff, all right, same as in Abernethy’s case, only his was blue. Of course, when the third one came along, and the fourth and fifth, the pattern was clear and we’re sure now the Smith woman was one of the series. The more we dig in the surer we get. The picture, atmosphere, are the same. A killer who came and went and didn’t even leave a shadow on a windowshade.”

“Still—”

But the old man was shaking his head. “We’ve worked the vine overtime. If Violette was slated to go we’d get some hint of it. But the stools don’t know a thing. It’s not that they’ve clammed up; they just don’t know.

“She wasn’t in any trouble. This definitely wasn’t a crackdown for holding out, or anything like that. Vi was in the racket for a living and she was smart enough to play ball without a squawk. She took shakedowns as part of the hazards of the business. She was well-liked, one of the old reliables.”

“Over 40,” said Ellery. “In a wearing profession. I don’t suppose—”

“Suicide? Impossible.”

Ellery scratched his nose. “Tell me more.”

“She wasn’t found for over thirty-six hours. On the morning of June 24 a girl friend of hers who’d been trying to reach her by phone a whole day and night climbed the stairs, found Violette’s door shut but not locked, went in—”

“Abernethy’s body was found seated in an easy-chair,” said Ellery. “Exactly how was the Smith woman found?”

“Her flat was a bedroom and sitting room — kitchenette was one of those wall-unit jobs. She was found on the floor in the doorway between the two rooms.”

“Facing which way?” asked Ellery quickly.

“I know, I know, but there was no way of telling. She was all bunched up. Might have fallen from any position.”

“Attacked from which direction?”

“From behind, same as Abernethy. And the cord knotted.”

“Oh, yes, there’s that.”

“What?”

“The cord was knotted in Abernethy’s case, too. It’s bothered me.”

“Why?” The Inspector sat up.

“Well... there’s a sort of finality about it.”

“A what?”

“Decorative, but was it necessary? You’d hardly let go till your victim was dead, would you? Then why the knot? In fact, it would be pretty hard to tie a knot while the victim was strangling. It suggests that the knots were tied after they were dead.”

His father was staring.

“It’s like putting a bow on a package that’s quite adequately wrapped. The extra — I almost said the artistic — touch. Neat, satisfying. Satisfying a... what would you say? a passion for completeness? finality? Yes, so damned final.”

“What in the world are you talking about?”

“I’m not sure,” said Ellery mournfully. “Tell me — was there a sign of forcible entry?”

“No. The general opinion is that she expected her killer. Like Abernethy.”

“Posing as a client?”

“Could be. If he was, it was only to get in. The bedroom wasn’t disturbed and while she was found wearing a wrapper, she had a slip and panties on underneath. The testimony is she nearly always wore a negligee when she was home. But it could have been anybody, Ellery. Someone she knew well or someone she didn’t know so well or even someone she didn’t know at all. It wasn’t hard,” said the Inspector, “to make Miss Smith’s acquaintance.”

“The other tenants—”

“Nobody heard a thing. The restaurant people didn’t even know she existed. You know how it is in New York.”

“Ask no questions and mind your own business.”

“While the lady upstairs is getting herself dead.”

The Inspector got up and fussed to a window. But immediately he returned to his chair, scowling. “In other words,” he said, “we drew a blank in the Smith case, too. Then—”

“Question. Did you find any connection between Abernethy and Violette Smith? Any at all?”

“No.”

“Go on.”

“Cometh Number 3,” said the Inspector in a sort of liturgical mutter. “Rian O’Reilly, 40-year-old shoe salesman, living with his wife and four kids in a Chelsea tenement. Date, July 18; twenty-six days after the Smith murder.

“O’Reilly’s kill,” the Inspector said, “was so damn... so damn discouraging. He was a hardworking fellow, good husband, crazy father, struggling to keep his head above water and having a tough time of it. To keep his family going O’Reilly held down two jobs, a full-timer in a lower Broadway shoe store, a night relief job in a shop on Fulton and Flatbush across the river in Brooklyn. He’d have managed to scrape along if he hadn’t run into such hard luck. One of his children got polio two years ago. Another got pneumonia. Then his wife splashed herself with hot paraffin putting up grape jelly and he paid a skin specialist for a year trying to heal her burn. On top of that another kid was run over by a hit-and-run driver who was never identified and spent three months in a hospital. O’Reilly’s borrowed the limit against his $1000 insurance policy. His wife had hocked her measly engagement ring. They’d had a ‘39 Chewy — O’Reilly sold it to pay doctors’ bills.

“O’Reilly liked his nip now and then, but he gave up drinking. Even beer. He held himself down to ten cigarettes a day, and he’d been a heavy smoker. His wife put up box lunches and he didn’t eat supper till he got home, usually after midnight. In the past year he’d suffered a lot from toothache, but he wouldn’t go to a dentist, said he didn’t have time for such foolishness. But he’d toss around some at night, his wife said.”

The heat flowed through their windows. Inspector Queen wiped his face with a ball of handkerchief.

“O’Reilly was no Saturday night Irishman. He was a little guy, thin and ugly, with heavy eyebrows that made him look worried even when he was dead. He used to tell his wife he was a physical coward, but she thought he’d had plenty of guts. I guess he did, at that. He was born in Hell’s Kitchen and his life was one long battle. With his drunk of a father and with the street hoodlums when he was a boy, and after that with poverty and sickness. Remembering his old man, who used to beat up his mother, O’Reilly tried to make up for it to his own wife and children. His whole life was his family.

“He was wild about classical music. He couldn’t read a note and he’d never had a lesson, but he could hum snatches of a lot of operas and symphonies and during the summer he tried to take in as many of the free Sunday concerts in Central Park as he could. He was always after his kids to tune in WQXR, used to say he thought Beethoven would do them a lot more good than The Shadow. One of his boys has a talent for the violin; O’Reilly finally had to stop his lessons. The night that happened, Mrs. O’Reilly said, he cried like a baby all night.

“This was the man,” said Inspector Queen, watching his curling toes, “whose strangled body was found early in the morning of July 19 by the janitor of the building. The janitor was mopping the entrance hall down when he noticed a heap of clothes in the dark space behind the stairway. It was O’Reilly, dead.

“Prouty fixed the time of death as between midnight and 1 A.M. of the 18th-19th. Obviously, O’Reilly was just coming home from his night job in Brooklyn. We checked with the store and the time he left jibed, sure enough, with his movements if he’d gone directly home and been attacked as he entered the house on the way upstairs. There was a lump on the side of his head—”

“The result of a blow, or from a fall,” asked Ellery.

“We’re not sure. A blow seems more likely, because he was dragged — there are rubberheel scrapes on the marble — from just inside the front door to the spot under the stairs where the janitor found him. No struggle, and nobody heard anything.” The Inspector pinched his nose so hard the tip remained whitish for a few seconds. “Mrs. O’Reilly had been up all night waiting for her husband, afraid to leave the kids alone in the apartment. She was just going to phone the police — they held on to their phone, she said, because O’Reilly always said suppose one of the kids got sick in the middle of the night? — when the cop the janitor’d called came up to give her the bad news.

“She told me she’d been scared and nervous ever since the Abernethy murder. ‘Rian had to come home from Brooklyn so late,’ she said. ‘I kept at him to quit the night job, and then when that woman on West 44th Street was choked to death too I nearly went out of my mind. But Rian only laughed. He said nobody’d bother to kill him, he wasn’t worth killing.”

Ellery planted his elbows on his naked knees and his face secretively between his hands.

The Inspector said, “Seems like it’s getting hotter,” and Ellery mumbled something. “It’s against nature,” complained the Inspector. He took off his shirt and undershirt and he plastered them with a smack against the back of his chair. “Leaving a widow and four children, with what was left of his insurance going to pay for his burial. I understand his priest is trying to do something, but it’s a poor parish and O’Reilly’s heirs are now enjoying City relief.”

“And now his kids will be listening to The Shadow if they can hang on to their radio.” Ellery rubbed his neck. “No clues.”

“No clues.”

“The cord.”

“Same silk, blue.”

“Knotted at the back?”

“Plenty of rhyme,” muttered Ellery. “But where’s the reason?”

“You tell O’Reilly’s widow.”

And Ellery was quiet. But after a while he said, “It was about that time that the cartoonist was inspired. I remember the unveiling of the Cat. He jumped out at you from the editorial page of the Extra... such as it was and is. One of the great monsters of cartoonical time. The man should get the Pulitzer prize for Satanism. A diabolical economy of line; the imagination fills in what the artist leaves out. Guaranteed to share your bed. How Many Tails Has the Cat? asks the caption. And we count three distinct appendages, curling at the ends back upon themselves. Not thick true tails, you understand. More like cords. Ending in nooselike openings just right for necks... which aren’t there. And one cord bears the number 1, and the second cord bears the number 2 and the third cord the number 3. No Abernethy, Smith, or O’Reilly. He was so right. The Cat is quantitative. It’s numbers that equalize all men, the Founding Fathers and Abe Lincoln to the contrary notwithstanding. The Cat is the great leveler of humanity. It’s no accident that his claws are shaped like sickles.”

“Sweet talk, but the point is the day after August 9 there was the Cat again,” said the Inspector, “and he’d grown a fourth tail.”

“And I remember that, too,” nodded Ellery.

“Monica McKell. August 9. Twenty-two days after O’Reilly.”

“The perennial debutante. A mere 37 and going strong.”

“Park and 53rd. Café society. A table jumper they got to call Leaping Lena.”

“Or in a more refined phrase of Lucius Beebe — Madcap Monica.”

“That’s the one,” said the Inspector. “Also known as McKell’s Folly, McKell being her old man, the oil millionaire, who told me Monica was the only wildcat he’d never brought in. But you could see he was proud of her. She was wild, all right — cut her teeth on a gin bottle, came out during Prohibition, and her favorite trick when she was tight was to get behind the bar and outmix the bartender. They say she mixed the best Martini in New York, drunk or sober. She was born in a penthouse and died in the subway. Downhill all the way.

“Monica never married. She once said that the only unrelated male she’d ever known that she could stand having around for any length of time was a horse named Leibowitz, and the only reason she didn’t marry him, she said, was that she doubted she could housebreak him. She was engaged a dozen times, but at the last minute she’d take a walk. Her father would yell, and her ma, who’s a handkerchief-twister, would get hysterics, but it was no deal. They had high hopes about Monica’s last engagement — it looked as if she was really going to marry this Hungarian count — but the Cat put a crimp in that.”

“In the subway,” said Ellery.

“Sure, how did she get there. Well, it was this way. Monica McKell was the biggest booster the New York subway system ever had. She’d ride it every chance she got. She told Elsa Maxwell it was the only place a girl could get the feel of the people. She took a particular delight in dragging her escorts there, especially when they were in tails.

“Funny,” said the Inspector, “that it should have been the subway that did her in. Monica was out clubbing that night with Snooky — her count — and a bunch of their friends. They wound up in some Village dive, and around a quarter of four in the morning Monica got tired tending bar and they decided to call it a night. They began piling into cabs — all except Monica, who stood her ground and argued that if they really believed in the American way they’d all go home in the subway. The others were game, but the count got his Hungarian up — he was also tanked on vodka-and-Cokes — and said something like if he wanted to smell peasants he’d have stayed in Hungary and he’d be damned if he’d lower himself, into the ground or any other way, and she could bloody well go home in the subway herself if she wanted to so bad. And she did.

“And she did,” said the Inspector, licking his lips, “and she was found a little after 6 A.M. lying on a bench near the tailpiece of the platform of the Sheridan Square station. A trackwalker found her. He called a cop and the cop took one look and went green. There was the salmon-colored silk cord around her neck.”

The Inspector got up and went into the kitchen and came back with the pitcher of lemonade. They drank in silence and then the Inspector put the pitcher back in the icebox.

When he returned, Ellery said with a frown, “Was there time for—?”

“No,” said the Inspector. “She’d been dead about two hours. That would place the murder attack at around 4 A.M. or a little later, just about time for her to have, walked over to Sheridan Square from the night club and maybe wait around a few minutes — you know how the trains run at that hour of the morning. But Count Szebo was with the others until at least 5:30. They all stopped in at an allnight hamburger place on Madison and 48th on their way uptown. Every minute of his time is accounted for well past the murder period. Anyway, what would the point have been? Old man McKell had contracted to settle a hot million on Szebo when the knot was tied — excuse me, that was a bad figure of speech. I mean the count would have strangled himself before he’d lay a finger to that valuable throat. He doesn’t have a Hungarian pretzel.

“In Monica McKell’s case,” said the Inspector, shaking his head, “we were able to trace her movements right up the entrance of the Sheridan Square station. A nighthawk cab spotted her about halfway to the station from the club, pulled up alongside. She was on foot, alone. But she laughed and said to the hack, ‘You’ve got me wrong, my friend. I’m a poor working girl and I’ve just got a dime to get home on,’ and she opened her gold mesh bag and showed him; there was nothing in it but a lipstick, a compact, and a dime, he said. And she marched off down the street, the hack said, the diamond bracelet on her arm sparkling under the street lights. Squinting along like a movie star, was the way he put it. Actually, she was wearing a gold lamé creation designed like a Hindu sari, with a jacket of white mink thrown over it.

“And another cab driver parked near the station saw her cross the Square and disappear down the steps. She was still on foot, still alone.

“There was no one on duty at the change booth at that hour. Presumably she put her dime in the turnstile and walked down the platform to the end bench. A few minutes later she was dead.

“Her jewelry, her bag, her jacket weren’t touched.

“We’ve found no evidence that anybody else was on the platform with her. The second cab driver picked up a fare right after he saw Monica go down the subway steps, and apparently he was the only one around. The Cat may have been waiting on the platform; the Cat may have followed Monica down from the street after ducking into doorways to avoid being seen by the two cab drivers; or the Cat may have got off at Sheridan Square from an uptown train and found her there — there’s nothing to tell. If she put up a battle, there’s no sign of it. If she screamed, no one heard it. And that was the end of Monica McKell — born in New York, died in New York. From penthouse to subway. Downhill all the way.”

After a long time Ellery said, “A girl like that must have been mixed up in a thousand pulp story plots. I’ve heard a lot of scandal...”

“I am now,” sighed his father, “the world’s foremost authority on the Mysteries of Monica. I can tell you, for instance, that she had a burn scar just under the left breast that she didn’t get from falling on a hot stove. I know just where she was, and with whom, in February of 1946 when she disappeared and her father had us and the FBI chasing our tails looking for her, and despite what the papers said at the time her kid brother Jimmy had nothing to do with it — he’d just got out of the Service and he was having his own troubles readjusting to civilian life. I know how Monica came to get the autographed photo of Legs Diamond that’s still hanging on her bedroom wall, and it’s not for the reason you’d think. I know why she was asked to leave Nassau the year Sir Harry Oakes was murdered, and who asked her. I even know something J. Parnell Thomas never found out — that she was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party between 1938 and 1941, when she quit to become a Christian Fronter for four months, and then jumped that to take a course in Yoga Breathing Exercises under a Hollywood swami named Lal Dhyana Jackson.

“Yes, sir, I know everything there is to know about Leaping Lena, or Madcap Monica,” said the Inspector, “except how she came to be strangled by the Cat... I can tell you this, Ellery. If when the Cat walked up to her on that subway platform he said, ‘Excuse me, Miss McKell, I’m the Cat and I’m going to strangle you,’ she probably moved over on the bench and said, ‘How perfectly thrilling. Sit down and tell me more.’”

Ellery jumped up. He took a turn around the living room, busily, like a runner limbering up. Inspector Queen watched the sweat roll down his back.

“And that,” said the Inspector, “is where we’re hung up.”

“Nothing—?”

“Not a bastardly thing. I suppose,” the old man said angrily, “I can’t blame McKell Senior for offering $100,000 reward, but all it’s done is give the papers another angle to play up and flood us with a barrage of happy gas from ten thousand crackpots. And it hasn’t been any help having McKell’s high-priced prima donna dicks underfoot, either!”

“What about the current mouse?”

“Number 5?” The Inspector cracked his knuckles, clicking off integers in a bitter arithmetic. “Simone Phillips, 35, lived with a younger sister in a coldwater flat on East 102nd Street.” He grimaced. “This mouse couldn’t even rustle her own cheese. Simone’d had something wrong with her spine since childhood and she was paralyzed from the waist down. Spent most of her life in bed. What you might call a pushover.”

“Yes.” Ellery was sucking a piece of lemon and making a face. “Doesn’t seem cricket, somehow. Even from the Cat.”

“It happened last Friday night. August 19. Ten days after the McKell woman. Celeste — the younger sister — fixed Simone up, turned on the radio for her, and left for a neighborhood movie. Around 9 o’clock.”

“Pretty late?”

“She went for just the main feature. Celeste said Simone hated being left alone, but she simply had to get out once a week—”

“Oh, this was routine?”

“Yes. The sister went every Friday night — her only recreation, by the way. Simone was helpless and Celeste was the only one she had. Anyway, Celeste ‘got back a little after 11. She found the paralytic strangled. Salmon-colored silk cord tied around her neck.”

“The crippled woman could hardly have let anyone in. Weren’t there any signs—?”

“Celeste never locked the apartment door when she had to leave Simone. Simone was deathly afraid of gas leaks and fires, afraid she’d be caught helpless in bed sometime when her sister wasn’t there. Leaving the door unlocked eased her mind. For the same reason they had a phone, which they certainly couldn’t afford.”

“Last Friday night. Almost as hot as tonight,” mused Ellery. “In that district the people would all be congregated on the stoop, hanging out the windows. Do you mean to tell me no one saw anything?”

“There’s so much testimony to the effect that no stranger entered the building through the front entrance between 9 and 11 that I’m convinced the Cat got in through the rear. There’s a back door leading out to a court, and the court is accessible, from one of a half-dozen different directions, the backs of the other houses and the two side streets; it runs right through. The Phillips flat is on the ground floor, rear. The hall is dark, has only a 25-watt light. That’s the way he got in, all right, and out again. But we’ve been over the square block a dozen times, inside the buildings and out, and we haven’t turned up a thing.”

“No screams.”

“If she did yell, nobody paid any attention to it. You know what a tenement district’s like on a hot night — kids out on the street till all hours and screams a dime a dozen. But my hunch is she didn’t make a sound. I’ve never seen such fright on a human face. Paralysis on top of paralysis. She didn’t put up the scrawniest kind of scrap. Wouldn’t surprise me if she just sat there with her mouth open, pop-eyed, while the Cat took his cord out and tied it around her neck and pulled it tight. Yes, sir, this was his easiest strike.”

The Inspector pulled himself to his feet. “Simone was very fat, from the waist up. The kind of fat that gives you the feeling that if you poked it you’d go clear through to the other side. As if she had no bones, no muscle.”

“Musculus,” said Ellery, sucking the lemon. “Little mouse. The shrunken little mice to the mouse. Little atrophies.”

“Well, she’d been parked in that bed over twenty-five years.” The old man trudged to one of the windows. “Sure is a scorcher.”

“Simone, Celeste.”

“What?” said the Inspector.

“Their names. So Gallic. Maternal poetry? And if not, how come ‘Phillips’?”

“Their father was French. The family name was originally Phillippe, but he Anglicized it when he came to America.”

“Mother French, too?”

“I think so, but they were married in New York. Phillips was in the import-export business and he made a fortune during the First World War. He dropped it all in the ’29 crash and blew his brains out, leaving Mrs. Phillips penniless.”

“With a paralyzed child. Tough.”

“Mrs. Phillips managed by taking in sewing. They made out fine, Celeste says — in fact, she was enrolled as a freshman in N.Y.U. downtown when Mrs. Phillips died of pleurisy-pneumonia. That was five years ago.”

“Must have been even tougher. For Celeste.”

“It couldn’t have been a peach parfait. Simone needed constant attention. Celeste had to quit school.”

“How’d she manage?”

“Celeste has a modeling job in a dress shop her mother did business with. Afternoons and all day Saturday. She has a beautiful figure, dark coloring — pretty goodlooking number. She could make a lot more somewhere else, she told me, but the store isn’t far from their home and she couldn’t leave Simone alone too long. I got the impression Celeste was pretty much dominated by Simone and this was confirmed by the neighbors. They told me Simone nagged at Celeste all the time, whining and complaining and making the younger sister, who they all think is a saint, run her legs off. Probably accounts for her beat-up look; she really was dragging her chin when I saw her.”

“Tell me,” said Ellery. “On Friday night last did this saintly young character go to the movies alone?”

“Yes.”

“Does she usually?”

The Inspector looked surprised. “I don’t know.”

“Might pay to find out.” Ellery leaned far forward to smooth out a wrinkle in the rug. “Doesn’t she have a boy friend?”

“I don’t think so. I gather she hasn’t had much opportunity to meet men.”

“How old is this Celeste?”

“23.”

“Ripe young age. — The cord was tussah silk?”

“Yes.”

The rug was now smooth.

“And that’s all you have to tell me?”

“Oh, there’s lots more, especially about Abernethy, Violette Smith, and Monica McKell.”

“What?”

“I’ll be happy to open the files to you.”

Ellery was silent.

“Want to go over them?” asked his father.

“You found no connection among any of the five victims.”

“Not a particle.”

“None of them knew any of the others.”

“As far as we can tell.”

“They had no common friends, acquaintances, relatives?”

“So far we haven’t hit any.”

“Religious affiliation?” asked Ellery suddenly.

“Abernethy was a communicant of the Episcopal Church — in fact, at one time, before his father died, he was studying for the ministry. But he gave that up to take care of his mother on a regular basis. Certainly there’s no record that he ever went after his mother died.

“Violette Smith’s family are Lutherans. As far as we know, she herself went to no church. Her family threw her out years ago.

“Monica McKell — all the McKells — Presbyterian. Mr. and Mrs. McKell are very active in church affairs and Monica — it sort of surprised me — was quite religious.

“Rian O’Reilly was a devout Roman Catholic.

“Simone Phillips came of French Protestants on both sides, but she herself was interested in Christian Science.”

“Likes, dislikes, habits, hobbies...”

The Inspector turned from the window. “What?”

“I’m fishing for a common denominator. The victims form a highly conglomerate group. Yet there must be some quality, some experience, some function they shared...”

“There’s not a single indication that the poor mutts were tied up any way at all.”

“As far as you know.”

The Inspector laughed. “Ellery, I’ve been on this merry-go-round since the first ride and I tell you there’s as much sense in these killings as there was in a Nazi crematorium.

“The murders haven’t followed any time pattern or recognizable sequence. The intervals between the various crimes have been nineteen days, twenty-six. twenty-two, ten. It’s true that they all occurred at night, but that’s when cats walk, isn’t it?

“The victims came from all over the City. East 19th near Gramercy Park. West 44th between Broadway and Sixth. West 20th near Ninth. Park and 53rd, in this case the victim actually getting it under Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village. And East 102nd.

“Economically? Upper crust, middle class, the poor. Socially? You find a pattern that includes an Abernethy, a Violette Smith, a Rian O’Reilly, a Monica McKell, and a Simone Phillips.

“Motive? Not gain. Not jealousy. Not anything personal.

“There’s nothing to indicate that these have been sex crimes, or that a sex drive is even behind it.

“Ellery, this is killing for the sake of killing. The Cat’s enemies are the human race. Anybody on two legs, will do. If you ask me, that’s what’s really cooking in New York. And unless we clamp the lid on this — this homicide, it’s going to boil over.”

“And yet,” said Ellery, “for an undiscriminating, unselective, blood-lusting and mankind-hating brute, I must say the Cat shows a nice appreciation of certain values.”

“Values?”

“Well, take time. The Cat uses time the way Thoreau did, as a stream, to go fishing in. To catch Abernethy in his bachelor apartment he’d have to run the risk of being seen or heard entering or leaving, because Abernethy was an early-to-bed man. What’s more, Abernethy rarely had a visitor, so that going to his door at a normal hour might have aroused a neighbor’s curiosity. So what does the Cat do? He contrives to get Abernethy to agree to an appointment at an hour when the building’s settled down for the night. To accomplish this called for the considerable feat of making an ossified bachelor change a habit of years’ standing. In other words, the Cat weighed the difficulties against the time and he chose in favor of the time.

“In Violette Smith’s case, whether it was done by appointment or as a result of careful study of her business practices, you can’t deny that the Cat did pick a time when a very busy lady was in her flat alone.

“O’Reilly? Most vulnerable when he came home from his Brooklyn night job. And there was the Cat lying in wait in the downstairs hall. Nicely timed, wouldn’t you say?”

The Inspector listened without comment.

“Monica McKell? A woman obviously running away from herself. And that kind of woman — from that kind of background — loses herself in crowds. She was always surrounded by people. It’s no accident that she adored the subway. Monica must have presented a problem. Still — the Cat caught her alone, in a place and at a time which were most favorable for his project. How many nights did he trail her, I wonder; watching for just the right moment?

“And Simone, the paralytic. Easy pickings once he got to her. But how to get to her without being seen? Crowded tenement, the summer — daytime was out of the question, even when Celeste was away at work. But at night her sister is always with her. Always? Well, not exactly. On Friday nights the annoying Celeste goes to the movies. And Simone is strangled when? On a Friday night.”

“You finished?”

“Yes.”

Inspector Queen was remote. “Very plausible,” he said. “Very convincing. But you’re arguing from the premise that the Cat picks people in advance. Suppose I argue from the premise that he does nothing of the sort? — a premise, incidentally, that’s borne out by the total lack of connection among the victims.

“Then the Cat happened to be prowling on West 44th Street one night, picked a likely-looking building at random, chose the top floor apartment because it was closer to a roof getaway, pretended to be a salesman for nylons or French perfume — anything to get in — and that was the end of somebody whose name happened to be Violette Smith, call girl.

“On the night of July 18 he was feeling the urge again and chance took him to the Chelsea-district. It was around midnight, his favorite hunting hour. He follows a tired-looking little guy into a hall and that’s the end of a hard-working Irishman named O’Reilly. It might just as well have turned out to be William Miller, a shipping clerk who came home from a date with a Bronx girl around 2 A.M. and walked up the stairs under which O’Reilly’s body was lying, still warm.

“In the early morning hours of August 9 the Cat was on the loose in the Village. He spotted an unescorted woman, walking. He followed her to the Sheridan Square subway and that was the end of Well-Known New York Socialite, who should have stuck to her twelve-cylinder job.

“And on the night of August 19 he was up around 102nd Street hankering after another neck, and he got into a nice dark court and pussyfooted around till he saw through a ground floor window a fat young woman lying in a bed, alone. And that was the end of Simone Phillips.

“Now tell me something — anything — that says it didn’t happen that way.”

“Abernethy?”

“You left Abernethy out,” said Ellery. “Abernethy the Vague. Admittedly not a hard thing to do. But he is dead, he was strangled with one of those silk cords, and didn’t you yourself say it was by appointment?”

“I said the whole setup smacked of an appointment. But we don’t know it. Something could have made him sit up past his usual bedtime that night, maybe a radio program, or he fell asleep in the easychair. The Cat could have been in the building on the loose and seen the light under Abernethy’s door and knocked—”

“At which Abernethy let him in?”

“All he’d have to have done was unlock the door.”

“An Abernethy? At midnight?”

“Or maybe he’d forgotten to check his spring latch and the Cat just walked in, releasing it on his way out.”

“Then why didn’t Archibald use his lungs? Or run? How is it he permitted the Cat to get behind him while he sat in his chair?”

“He might have been — like Simone Phillips — scared stiff.”

“Yes,” said Ellery, “I suppose that’s possible.”

“I know,” muttered the Inspector. “The Abernethy thing doesn’t conform. Nothing conforms.” He shrugged. “I’m not saying you’re not right, Ellery. But you see what we’re up against. And the whole blasted thing’s in my lap now. It would be bad enough if that’s all I had to worry about. But he’s not through; you know that. There’s going to be another one, and another one after that, until we catch him or he drops dead from overexercise. How can we prevent it? There aren’t enough cops in the U.S. to make every nook and cranny of a city like New York murderproof. We can’t even be sure he’ll keep restricting his activities to Manhattan. And the other boroughs know it. They’re getting identical reactions from the public in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Richmond. Hell, it’s being felt on Long Island, in Westchester, Connecticut, New Jersey, all the commuter places. Sometimes I think it’s a bad dream. Ellery—”

Ellery’s lips parted.

“Don’t answer till I’m finished. You feel that you failed in the Van Horn case and that because you failed two people went to their deaths. Lord knows I’ve tried to help you get it out of your system. But I guess nobody can talk away another man’s conscience... I’ve had to sit by and watch you crawl into a hole while you kept swearing by the beards of all the Prophets that you’d never mix into another case.

“But son,” said the old man, “this is a special kind of deal. This one is tough. It’s tough not only on its own merits — which are tough enough — but because of the atmosphere it’s creating. This isn’t just a matter of clearing up a few murders, Ellery. It’s a race against — against citywide collapse. And don’t make with the eyebrow: I tell you it’s coming. It’s only a question of time. Just one murder in the wrong place... Nobody downtown’s out to rob me of the glory: not in this one. They’re all feeling sorry for the old duck. Let me tell you something.” The Inspector stared down at 87th Street, bracing himself against the window frame. “I mentioned earlier that I thought the Commissioner had an angle in putting me at the head of this special Cat squad. The boss thinks you’re a screwball, but he’s often asked me when you’re going to snap out of the sulks and get back to using the crazy talents God gave you. Well, my opinion, Ellery, is that he’s put me on the spot deliberately.”

“For what reason?”

“To force you into the case.”

“You’re not serious!”

His father looked at him.

“But he wouldn’t do a thing like that.” Ellery’s face was dark. “Not to you. That’s the dirtiest kind of slap in the face.”

“To stop these stranglings, son, I’d do a lot worse. Anyway, what’s the odds? You’re no superman. Nobody expects miracles. It’s even a sort of insult to you. In an emergency people will try anything, even tough old eggs like the Commissioner.”

“Thanks,” mumbled Ellery. “That sets me up. It really does.”

“Kidding aside. It would hit me pretty hard to think that when I needed you most you let me down. Ellery, how about getting into this?”

“You,” said the son, “are an extremely clever old man.”

The Inspector grinned.

“Naturally if I thought I could help out in a thing as serious as this I’d... But, damn it, Dad, I feel virginal. I want to and I don’t want to. Let me sleep on it. I’d be no use to you or anybody in my present state.”

“Fair enough,” said his father briskly. “Good grief, I’ve been making speeches. How do these politicians do it? How about some more lemonade, son, with a shot of gin in it to take the bite off?”

“In my case, it’ll take more than a shot.”

“Motion seconded.”

But neither meant it.

The Inspector sat down at the kitchen table with a groan, thinking that with Ellery the usual psychology was a waste of breath. The Cat and Ellery seemed two twinges of the same pain.

He leaned back against the tiled wall, tipping his chair.

The blasted heat...

He opened his eyes to find the Police Commissioner of the City of New York leaning over him.

“Dick, Dick,” the Commissioner was saying. “Wake up.”

Ellery was in the kitchen doorway, still in his shorts.

The Commissioner was hatless and the gabardine around his armpits was soaked.

Inspector Queen blinked up at him.

“I told them I’d notify you in person.”

“Notify me about what, Commissioner?”

“The Cat’s got another tail.”

“When?” The old man licked his lips.

“Tonight. Between 10:30 and midnight.”

“Where?” He brushed past them, darted into the living room, grabbed at his shoes.

“Central Park, not far from the 110th Street entrance. In some bushes behind a rock.”

“Who?”

“Beatrice Willikins, 32, single, sole support of an aged father. She’d taken him to the Park for some air and left him on a bench to go looking for water. She never came back and finally he called a Park patrolman. The patrolman found her a couple of hundred feet away, strangled. Salmon-colored silk cord. Purse not touched. Hit over the head from behind and signs of dragging into the bushes. The strangulation took place there, probably while she was unconscious. No superficial indication of rape.”

“No, Dad,” said Ellery. “Those are wet. Here’s a fresh shirt and undershirt.”

“Bushes, Park,” said the Inspector rapidly. “That’s a break. Or is it? Prints on the ground?”

“So far, nothing. But Dick,” said the Commissioner, “something new’s been added.”

The Inspector looked at him. He was trying to button his shirt. Ellery did it for him.

“Beatrice Willikins lived at West 128th Street.”

“West,” said the Inspector mechanically, sticking an arm into the jacket Ellery was holding up. Ellery was staring at the Commissioner.

“Near Lenox.”

“Harlem?”

The Commissioner swabbed his neck. “This one might do it, Dick. If someone lost his head.”

Inspector Queen ran to the door. He was very pale. “This means all night, Ellery. You go to bed.”

But Ellery was saying, “This one might do what if someone lost his head, Commissioner?”

“Push the button that blows New York higher than Hiroshima.”

“Come on, Commissioner,” said the Inspector impatiently from the foyer.

“Wait.” Ellery was looking politely at the Commissioner, and the Commissioner was looking just as politely at him. “If you’ll give me three minutes, I’ll go with you.”