Cat of Many Tails

4

Ellery was nervy that weekend. For hours he occupied himself with compass, ruler, pencil, graph paper. Plotting the curves of statistical mysteries. Finally he hurled his co-ordinates into the fireplace and sent them up in smoke. Inspector Queen, coming upon him that broiling Sunday apparently warming himself at a fire, made the feeble remark that if he had to live in purgatory he was going to do something about lowering the temperature.

Ellery laughed disagreeably. “There are no fans in hell.”

And he went into his study and made a point of closing the door.

But his father followed.

“Son.”

Ellery was standing at his desk. Glaring down at the case. He had not shaved for three days; under the rank stubble his skin was green and mortal.

Looks more like a vegetable gone to seed than a man, thought his father. And he said again, “Son.”

“Dad, I’d better give up.”

The Inspector chuckled. “You know you won’t. Feel like talking?”

“If you can suggest a cheerful topic of conversation.”

The Inspector turned on the fan. “Well, there’s always the weather. By the way, heard from your — what did you call those two — Irregulars?”

Ellery shook his head.

“How about a walk in the Park? Or a bus ride?”

“Nothing new?” muttered Ellery.

“Don’t bother shaving. You won’t meet anybody you know; the City’s half-empty. What do you say, son?”

“That’s another thing.” Ellery looked out. There was a crimson hem on the sky. It brushed the buildings. “This damned weekend.”

“Now look,” said his father. “The Cat’s operated strictly on working days. No Saturday, no Sunday, and he bypassed the only holiday since he got going, Fourth of July. So we don’t have to get the jitters about the Labor Day weekend.”

“You know what New York’s like on Labor Day night.” The buildings bloodied. Twenty-four hours from now, he thought. “Bottlenecks at every road, bridge, tunnel, terminal. Everybody cramming back into town at the same time.”

“Come on, Ellery! Let’s take in a movie. Or, I’ll tell you what. We’ll rustle up a revue. I wouldn’t mind seeing a leg show tonight.”

Ellery failed to smile. “I’d only take the Cat with me. You go on and enjoy yourself, Dad. I’d be no fun at all.”

The Inspector, a sensible man, went.

But he did not go to a leg show.

With the assistance of a busman, he went downtown to Police Headquarters instead.

The dark turned cherry-colored in the heat as the French blades swished toward his neck. He held himself ready. He was calm, even happy. The tumbril below was jammed with cats knitting solemnly with silk cords of blue and salmon-pink and nodding their approval. A small cat, no larger than an ant, sat just under his nose looking up at him. This cat had black eyes. As he all but felt the flick of the knife and the clean and total pain across his neck it seemed to him the night lifted and a great light flew over everything.

Ellery opened his eyes.

His cheek throbbed where something on the desk had corrupted it and he was wondering that the screeching agony of the dream persisted past its borders when it occurred to him that the telephone in his father’s bedroom was ringing in a nasty monotone.

He got up and went into the bedroom and turned on the light.

1:45.

“Hello.” His neck ached.

“Ellery.” The Inspector’s voice stung him awake. “I’ve been ringing for ten minutes.”

“I fell asleep at my desk. What’s up, Dad? Where are you?”

“Where would I be on this line? I’ve been hanging around all evening. Still dressed?”

“Yes.”

“Meet me right away at the Park-Lester apartment house. It’s on East 84th between Fifth and Madison.”

1:45 A.M. It is therefore Labor Day. The 25th of August to the 5th of September. Eleven days. Eleven is one more than ten. Between Phillips, Simone, and Willikins, Beatrice, it was ten days. One more than ten makes...

“Ellery, you there?”

“Who is it?” His head ached abominably.

“Ever hear of Dr. Edward Cazalis?”

“Cazalis?”

“Never mind—”

“The psychiatrist?”

“Yes.”

“Impossible!”

You crept along the catwalk of a rationale while the night split into a billion tinsel fragments.

“What did you say, Ellery?”

He felt hung up in far space. Lost.

“It couldn’t be Dr. Cazalis.” He mustered his forces.

The Inspector’s voice said craftily, “Now what would make you say a thing like that, son?”

“Because of his age. Cazalis can’t be the seventh victim. It’s out of the question. There’s a mistake somewhere.”

“Age?” The old man floundered. “What the devil has Cazalis’s age got to do with anything?”

“He must be in his mid-60s. It can’t be Cazalis. It’s not in the scheme.”

“What scheme?” His father was shouting.

“It’s not Dr. Cazalis, is it? If it’s Dr. Cazalis...”

“It just happens it isn’t!”

Ellery sighed.

“It’s Cazalis’s wife’s niece,” said the Inspector peevishly. “She’s Lenore Richardson. The Park-Lester is where the Richardsons live. The girl, her father and mother.”

“Do you know how old she was?”

“Late or middle 20s, I think.”

“Not married?”

“I don’t think so. I have very little information. I’ve got to hang up now, Ellery. Get a move on.”

“I’ll be right there.”

“Wait. How do you know Cazalis wasn’t—?”

Just across the Park, Ellery was thinking, staring at the phone on the cradle. He had already forgotten having put it there.

The phone book.

He ran back to the study, grabbed the Manhattan directory.

Richardson.

Richardson Lenore 12 ½ E. 84.

There was also a Richardson Zachary 12 ½ E. 84 listed at the same number.

Ellery went about shaving and changing his clothes in a blissful nirvana.

Later, it was possible to synthesize his nightlong impressions into one complex. The night itself was a jumble. Faces flowed and crossed and hung apart; fragments of things said, voices broken, tears shed, looks passed, men coming, telephones ringing, pencils writing; doors, a chaise, a photograph, photographers, measurements, sketches, a small bluish fist, the dangle of a silk cord, a gold Louis XVI clock on an Italian marble fireplace, an oils nude, a torn book jacket...

But Ellery’s mind was a machine. The unselective evidence of his senses stoked it, and after a while out came a product.

Tonight’s production, by a squirrel instinct, Ellery stored away, sensing a future need.

The girl herself told him nothing. He could see what she might have been, but only from a photograph; the flesh, hardened at the supreme moment of the struggle not to die, was the usual meaningless petrifaction. She had been small and cuddlesome, with soft brown curly hair. Her nose was saucy and her mouth — from the photograph — had been pettish. She was manicured and pedicured and her hair had been recently set. The lingerie under her pongee negligee was expensive. The book she had been reading at the pounce of the Cat was a tattered reprint of Forever Amber. The remains of an orange and a few cherry pits lay on the inlaid occasional table beside the chaise. On the table also were a bowl of fruit, a silver cigaret box, an ashtray with fourteen lipstick-tipped butts in it, and a silver table lighter in the shape of an armored knight. In the withering lividity of death the girl looked 50; in the photograph, a recent one, untouched 18. She had been 25 and an only child.

Ellery dismissed Lenore Richardson as a regrettable intrusion.

The living told no more.

They were four: the father and mother of the murdered girl; the girl’s aunt — Mrs. Richardson’s sister — Mrs. Cazalis; and the eminent Dr. Cazalis.

There was no family fellowship in their grief. This Ellery found stimulating, and he studied them carefully one by one.

The mother passed what was left of the night in uncurbed hysterics. Mrs. Richardson was a superb woman of middle age, rather too fashionably gowned, and overjeweled. Ellery thought he discovered in her a chronic anxiety, unrelated to her sorrow; like the frown of a colicky infant. She was apparently the kind of woman who hoards life like a miser. The gold of her youth having tarnished, what little remained she kept gilding and packaging in extravagant self-delusion. Now she writhed and shrieked as if, in losing her daughter, she had found something long mislaid.

The father, a gray little rigid man of 60, looked like a jeweler, or a librarian. Actually, he was the head of Richardson, Leeper & Company, one of the oldest wholesale drygoods houses in New York. Ellery had passed the Richardson, Leeper & Company building often in his prowls about the City. It stood nine stories high on half a square block on Broadway and 17th Street. The firm was known for its old-fashioned merchant virtues: sternly nonunionized, run on the benevolent-patron system, with employees who tottered comfortably, along in the traces until they dropped. Richardson would be unswervingly honest, unalterably stubborn, and as narrow as a straight line. This was all quite beyond him. He could only sit by himself in a corner glancing bewilderedly from the tormented woman in the evening gown to the tumbled little mountain range under the blanket.

Richardson’s sister-in-law was much younger than his wife; Ellery judged Mrs. Cazalis to be early-fortyish. She was pallid, slender, tall, and self-contained. Unlike her older sister, she had found her orbit; her eyes went often to her husband. She had a submissive quality Ellery had found frequently in the wives of brilliant men. This was a woman whose marriage was the sum of existence to her, in a pitifully arithmetic way. In a society composed largely of Mrs. Richardsons, Mrs. Cazalis would tend to have few friends and few social interests. She comforted her middleaged sister as a mother might soothe a child in a tantrum; it was only during Mrs. Richardson’s wilder vocalisms that the younger woman’s ministrations took on an edge of rebuke and resentment. It was as if she felt herself cheapened and cheated. There was a virginal, unthawed sensitivity in her, a chill delicacy of feeling, which recoiled from her sister’s exhibitionism.

It was during one of these moments that an amused male voice said in Ellery’s ear, “I see you’ve noticed it.”

Ellery turned quickly. It was Dr. Cazalis, big and stoop-shouldered and powerful, with cold milky eyes and masses of icegray hair; a glacier of a man. His voice was deliberate and carried a musical undertone of cynicism. Ellery had heard somewhere that Dr. Cazalis had an unusual history for a psychiatrist; meeting the man for the first time, he was disposed to acceptance of the report. He must be 65, Ellery thought, possibly older; in semi-retirement, taking only a few cases, chiefly women, and those on a selective basis — it all added up to failing health, the declining phase of a medical career, the coronary age; and yet Dr. Cazalis seemed, aside from a certain restlessness of his large thick surgeon’s hands, a vigorous and functioning personality; certainly not a man to spare himself. It was a puzzle, not the less interesting for its irrelevance. His rather encyclopedic eyes were unavoidable. He sees everything, thought Ellery, and he tells exactly nothing; or what he tells is automatically conditioned by what he thinks his hearer ought to know.

“Noticed what, Dr. Cazalis?”

“The difference between my wife and her sister. Where Lenore was concerned, my sister-in-law was criminally inadequate. She was afraid of the child, jealous and overindulgent. Alternated between pampering and screaming at her. And in the sulks ignored Lenore entirely. Now Della’s in a panic overwhelmed by feelings of guilt. Clinically speaking, mothers like Della wish for the death of their young and when it happens they set up a terrified howl for forgiveness. Her grief is for herself.”

“It seems to me Mrs. Cazalis is as aware of that as you are, Doctor.”

The psychiatrist shrugged. “My wife’s done what she could. We lost two babies in the delivery room within four years of our marriage and Mrs. Cazalis was never able to have another. She transferred her affections to Della’s child and it compensated each of them — I mean my wife and Lenore — for her own lack. It couldn’t be complete, of course; for one thing, the biological but otherwise inadequate mama is always a problem. Essentially,” said the doctor dryly, glancing over at the sisters, “essentially unsatisfactory even in mourning. The mother beats her breast and the aunt suffers in silence. I was rather fond of the little chicken,” said Dr. Cazalis suddenly, “myself.” He walked away.

By 5 A.M. they had the facts orderly. Such as there were.

The girl had been home alone. She was to have accompanied her father and mother to a party in Westchester at the home of one of Mrs. Richardson’s friends, but Lenore had begged off. (“She was due for her menses,” Mrs. Cazalis told Inspector Queen. “Lenore always had a hard time. She told me in the morning over the phone that she wouldn’t be able to go. And Della was cross with her.”) Mr. and Mrs. Richardson had left for Westchester shortly after 6 o’clock; it was a dinner party. One of the two domestics, the cook, was away for the holiday, having left Saturday afternoon to visit her family in Pennsylvania. The other, a maid, had been given the night off by Lenore herself; since she did not sleep in, she was not expected until morning.

The Cazalises, who lived eight blocks away, at Park Avenue and 78th Street, had been worried about Lenore all evening. At 8:30 Mrs. Cazalis had telephoned. Lenore had said she was “in the usual crampy dumps” but otherwise all right and that her aunt and uncle were not to “throw fits” about her. But when Mrs. Cazalis learned that Lenore had characteristically failed to eat anything, she had gone over to the Richardson apartment, prepared a warm meal, forced Lenore to eat it, made the girl comfortable on the chaise in the living room, and had spent perhaps an hour with her niece afterward, talking.

Lenore had been depressed. Her mother, she had told her aunt, had been hounding her to “get married and stop running from one man to another like a stupid high school girl.” Lenore had been deeply in love with a boy who was killed at St.-Lô, a poor boy of Jewish origin of whom Mrs. Richardson had violently disapproved; “Mother doesn’t understand and she won’t let him alone even when he’s dead.” Mrs. Cazalis had let the girl pour out her troubles and then had tried to get her to bed. But Lenore said “with all this pain” she would stay up reading; the heat was bothering her, too. Mrs. Cazalis had urged her not to stay up too late, had kissed her good night, and left. It was about 10 P.M. She had last seen her niece reclining on the chaise, reaching for a book, and smiling.

At home, Mrs. Cazalis had wept, her husband had soothed her, and he had sent her to bed. Dr. Cazalis was staying up over an involved case history and he had promised his wife he would call Lenore before turning in, “as the chances are Della and Zach won’t be rolling in till 3 or 4 in the morning.” At a few minutes past midnight the doctor phoned the Richardson apartment. There was no answer. Five minutes later he tried again. There was an extension in Lenore’s bedroom so that even if she had gone to sleep the repeated rings of the phone should have aroused her. Disturbed, Dr. Cazalis had decided to investigate. Without awakening his wife, he had walked over to the Park-Lester and found Lenore Richardson on the chaise with the salmon-colored silk cord imbedded in her flesh, dead of strangulation.

His in-laws had still not returned. Except for the dead girl, the apartment was empty. Dr. Cazalis had notified the police and, finding the telephone number of Mrs. Richardson’s Westchester friends on the foyer table — “I left it for Lenore in case she felt sick and wanted me to come home,” sobbed Mrs. Richardson — he had notified them that something had “happened” to Lenore. He had then phoned his wife to come at once, as she was, in a taxi. Mrs. Cazalis had hurried over with a long coat thrown over her nightgown to find the police already there. She collapsed, but by the time the Richardsons arrived she had recovered sufficiently to take charge of her sister — “for which,” muttered Inspector Queen, “she ought to get the Nobel peace award.”

The usual variation on the theme, thought Ellery. Chips of incident and accident, the death-colored core remaining. The non-crackable nut.

(“I took one look at the silk cord around her neck,” said Dr. Cazalis, “and I recall only one coherent thought. ‘The Cat.’”)

Pending daylight examination of the terrace and roof — the living room French doors had stood open all evening — they were inclined to the belief that the Cat had gained entrance boldly through the front door by way of the self-service penthouse elevator. Mrs. Cazalis recalled having tried the front door from the foyer on her way out at 10 o’clock and, at that time, the door was locked; but on her husband’s arrival about 12:30 A.M. the door was wide open, held ajar by a doorstop. Since the doorstop revealed the dead girl’s fingerprints, it was evident that Lenore had propped the apartment door open after her aunt’s departure, probably to encourage some slight circulation of air; it was a stifling night. The night doorman remembered Mrs. Cazalis’s arrival and departure and Dr. Cazalis’s arrival after midnight; but he admitted that he had slipped out several times in the course of the evening to get a cold bottle of beer at the delicatessen at 86th Street and Madison Avenue and that, even while he was on duty in the lobby, a prowler could have got past him unnoticed: “It’s been a hot night, half the tenants are out of town, and I snoozed on the lobby settee on and off the whole evening.” He had seen and heard nothing out of the ordinary.

Neighbors had heard no screams.

The fingerprint men turned up nothing of interest.

Dr. Prouty of the Medical Examiner’s office was unable to fix the time of death more accurately than the limits defined by Mrs. Cazalis’s departure and her husband’s arrival.

The strangling cord was of tussah silk.

“Henry James would have called it,” said Dr. Cazalis, “the fatal futility of facts.”

They were sitting around at dawn in the wreckage of the night over cold ginger ale and beer. Mrs. Cazalis had prepared a platter of cold chicken sandwiches to which no one applied but Inspector Queen, and he only under Ellery’s bullying. The body had been removed on the official order; the sinister blanket was gone; a breeze blew from the penthouse terrace. Mrs. Richardson was asleep in her bedroom under sedation.

“With all respect to the Great Casuist,” replied Ellery, “it’s not the futility of facts that’s fatal, Doctor, but their scarcity.”

“In seven murders?” cried the doctor’s wife.

“Seven multiplied by zero, Mrs. Cazalis. Well, perhaps not quite, but it’s very difficult.”

Inspector Queen’s jaws were going mechanically. He seemed not to be listening.

“What can I do!”

They were startled. Lenore’s father had been still so long.

“I’ve got to do something. I can’t just sit here. I have a great deal of money...”

“I’m afraid money won’t do it, Mr. Richardson,” said Ellery. “Monica McKell’s father had the same idea. His offer of $100,000 reward on August 10 hasn’t even been threatened. It’s simply increased the work of the police.”

“How about turning in, Zach?” suggested Dr. Cazalis.

“She didn’t have an enemy in the world. Ed, you know that. Everyone was mad about her. Why did this... why did he pick Lenore? She was all I had. Why my daughter?”

“Why anybody’s daughter, Mr. Richardson?”

“I don’t care about the others. What do we pay our police for!”

Richardson was on his feet, his cheeks cerise.

“Zach.”

He sagged, and after a moment he mumbled something and went out very quietly.

“No, dear, let him go,” said the psychiatrist quickly to his wife. “Zach has that sturdy Scotch sense of the fitness of things and life is very precious to him. But I’ve got to worry about you. Your eyes are drooping out of your head. Come on, darling, I’ll take you home.”

“No, Edward.”

“Della’s asleep—”

“I won’t go without you. And you’re needed here.” Mrs. Cazalis took her husband’s paw. “Edward, you are. You can’t stay out of this now. Tell me you’ll do something.”

“Certainly. I’ll take you home.”

“I’m not a child!”

The big man sprang to his feet. “But what can I do? These people are trained to this sort of thing. I wouldn’t expect them to walk into my office and tell me how to treat a patient!”

“Don’t make me seem stupid, Edward.” Her voice had sharpened. “You can tell these gentlemen what you’ve told me so many times. Your theories—”

“Unfortunately, that’s all they are. Now let’s be sensible. You’re going home this—”

“Della needs me.” The taut voice was stretching.

“Darling.” He seemed startled.

“You know what Lenore meant to me.” Mrs. Cazalis broke. “You know, you know!”

“Of course.” His glance warned Ellery and Inspector Queen off. “Lenore meant a great deal to me, too. Now stop, you’ll make yourself very ill.”

“Edward, you know what you said to me!”

“I’ll do what I can. You’ve got to cut this out, dearest. Stop it.” Gradually, in his arms, her sobs subsided.

“But you haven’t promised.”

“You needn’t go home. I think you’re right. Della will need you. Use the guest room, dear. I’ll give you something to make you sleep.”

“Edward, promise!”

“I promise. Now I’m putting you to bed.”

When Dr. Cazalis returned, he looked apologetic. “I should have seen those hysterics coming on.”

“I’d welcome a good old-fashioned emotional binge myself right now,” murmured Ellery. “By the way, Doctor, which theories was Mrs. Cazalis referring to?”

“Theories?” Inspector Queen looked around. “Who’s got theories?”

“Why, I suppose I have,” said Dr. Cazalis, seating himself and reaching for a sandwich. “Say, what are those fellows doing out there, anyway?”

“Examining the terrace and roof. Tell me about these theories of yours, Doctor.” The Inspector took one of Ellery’s cigarets; he never smoked cigarets.

“I suppose everybody in New York has one or two,” smiled the psychiatrist. “The Cat murders would naturally not pass a psychiatrist by. And even though I don’t have the inside information at your disposal—”

“It wouldn’t add much to what you’ve read.”

Cazalis grunted. “I was about to say, Inspector, that I’m sure it wouldn’t make any material difference. Where it seems to me you people have gone off is in applying to these murders the normal investigatory technique. You’ve concentrated on the victims — admittedly the sensible methodology in ordinary cases, but in this one exactly wrong. In this case you stand a better chance concentrating on the murderer.”

“How do you mean?”

“Isn’t it true that the victims have had nothing in common?”

“Yes?”

“Their lives crossed nowhere?”

“As far as we can tell.”

“Take my word for it, you’ll never find a significant point of contact. The seven seem unrelated because they are unrelated. At no time did they stand a greater chance of interrelationship than if the murderer had shut his eyes and opened the telephone directory, let’s say, to seven different pages at random, determined to kill the forty-ninth person listed in the second column of each page.”

Ellery stirred.

“We have, then,” continued Dr. Cazalis, swallowing the last of his sandwich, “seven persons dying by the same hand who have no interidentity or contiguity. What does this mean in practical terms? A series of apparently indiscriminate acts of violence. To the trained mind, this spells psychosis. I say ‘apparently’ indiscriminate, by the way, because the conduct of the psychotic appears unmotivated only when judged in the perspective of reality — that is, by more or less healthy minds viewing the world as it is. The psychotic has his motivations, but they proceed from distorted views of reality and falsification of facts.

“My opinion, based on an analysis of the data available to me, is that the Cat — damn that cartoonist! an infamous libel on a very well-balanced beast! — suffers from what we call a systematized delusional state, a paranoid psychosis.”

“Well, naturally,” said the Inspector, who seemed disappointed, “one of our first theories was that the killer’s insane.”

“Insanity is the popular and legal term,” said Dr. Cazalis with a shrug. “There are any number of individuals who, though not insane in a legal sense, are nevertheless subjects of a psychosis. I suggest we stick to the medical terminology.”

“Psychotic, then. We’ve checked the mental hospitals time and again without result.”

“Not all psychotics are institutionalized, Inspector Queen,” said the psychiatrist dryly. “That’s exactly my point. If, for example, the Cat is a paranoid psychotic of the schizophrenic type, he may well be as normal in appearance and behavior — to the untrained eye — as any of us. He might remain unsuspected for a long time, during which he could do plenty of damage.”

“I never yet talked to one of you birds,” said the Inspector wearily, “that I didn’t come away with my chin dragging.”

“I gather, Dad,” said Ellery, “that Dr. Cazalis has more to disseminate than gloom. Go on, Doctor.”

“I was merely going to suggest the alternative, which is that he may be undergoing treatment, or may have been recently under treatment, by a private doctor. It would seem to me whoever’s committing these crimes is a local product, all seven murders having taken place in Manhattan, so a good place to start checking would be right in the borough here. It would mean, obviously, getting the co-operation of every man in the field. Each one, being briefed on what to look for, could comb his own records for patients, either current or discharged, who might be possibilities; and those possibilities would have to be questioned by trained people for clinical clues as well as investigated by you people in the routine way. It might be a total frost, of course, and there’d be a dickens of a lot of work—”

“It’s not the work,” muttered Inspector Queen. “It’s the trained personnel that’s bothering me.”

“Well, I’d be glad to do what I could to help. You heard my wife! I don’t have many patients these days—” the psychiatrist made a face — “I’m tapering off to retirement — so it wouldn’t work any special hardship on me.”

“Handsome offer, Dr. Cazalis.” The Inspector rubbed his mustache. “I’ll admit this has opened up a field we haven’t scratched. Ellery, what do you think?”

“By all means,” said Ellery promptly. “It’s a constructive suggestion and might well lead straight to our man.”

“Do I detect the faintest note of doubt?” smiled Dr. Cazalis. His powerful fingers were drumming on the table.

“Perhaps.”

“You don’t agree with my analysis.”

“Not entirely, Doctor.”

The psychiatrist stopped drumming.

“I’m not convinced that the crimes are indiscriminate.”

“Then you have information I haven’t.”

“No. I base my opinion on the same data, I’m sure. But, you see, there’s a pattern in these crimes.”

“Pattern?” Cazalis stared.

“The murders have a number of elements in common.”

“Including this one?” rasped the Inspector.

“Yes, Dad.”

Dr. Cazalis began to drum again. “I take it you don’t mean consistency of methods — the cords, strangling—”

“No. I mean elements common to the seven victims. I’m convinced they signify a plan of some sort, but what it arises from, what its nature is, where it’s going... Ellery’s eyes clouded.

“Sounds interesting.” Dr. Cazalis was studying Ellery surgically. “If you’re right, Mr. Queen, I’m wrong.”

“We may both be right. I have the feeling we are. ‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in ’t.’” They laughed together. “Dad, I’d emphatically recommend that Dr. Cazalis’s suggestion be followed up, and right away.”

“We’re breaking every rule in the book,” groaned his father. “Doctor, would you consider taking full charge?”

“I? Of the psychiatric end?”

“That’s right.”

Dr. Cazalis’s fingers stopped exercising. But they remained, as it were, available.

“This is going to be as big a selling as a medical job. It won’t work unless every doctor in the field co-operates. With you heading that phase of the investigation — with your reputation and professional connections, Doctor — it’s a guarantee of thorough coverage I don’t think we’d get another way. As a matter of fact,” said the Inspector thoughtfully, “it wouldn’t be a bad arrangement for other reasons. The Mayor’s already appointed my son special investigator. We’re covering the official end. With you in charge of a medical inquiry, it would give us a three-pronged offensive. Maybe,” said the Inspector, exhibiting his denture, “maybe we’d even turn up a little something.”

He said abruptly, “I’d have to get confirmation of this downtown, Dr. Cazalis, but something tells me the Mayor and the Commissioner will be very happy about the whole thing. Pending an okay, can I tell them you’re available?”

The psychiatrist threw up his hands. “What was that line from a movie I once saw? ‘Bilked by my own chicanery!’ All right, Inspector, I’m hooked. What’s the procedure?”

“Where are you going to be later today?”

“Depends on how Della and Zach behave themselves. Either here or at home, Inspector. This morning I’m going to try to get a few hours’ sleep.”

“Try?” Ellery stretched, rising. “In my case it won’t be the least problem.”

“Sleeping is always a problem with me. I’m a chronic insomniac — a symptom which is generally part of the clinical picture,” said the psychiatrist with a smile, “of dementia, general paresis, and so on, but don’t tell my patients. I keep well supplied with sleeping pills.”

“I’ll phone you this afternoon, Dr. Cazalis.”

Cazalis nodded to the Inspector and strolled out.

The Queens were silent. The men working on the terrace were beginning to drift away. Sergeant Velie was crossing the terrace in the sun.

“What do you think?” asked the Inspector suddenly.

“Think? About what, Dad?”

“Cazalis.”

“Oh. — Very solid citizen.”

“Yes, isn’t he.”

“Nothing doing,” said Sergeant Velie. “No sign of a damn thing, Inspector. He got in by that penthouse elevator, all right.”

“The only thing is,” mumbled the Inspector, “I wish he’d stop those figure exercise of his. Makes me nervous. — Oh, Velie. Knock off and get some shuteye.”

“What about those newspaper guys?”

“They’ve probably ganged up on Dr. Cazalis. Run interference for him and tell them I’ll be right there. With my own pet line of double talk.”

The sergeant nodded and clumped off, yawning.

“How about you, Dad?”

“I’ll have to go downtown first. You going home now?”

“If I can get away in one piece.”

“Wait in the hall closet. I’ll decoy ’em into the living room here and then you can make the break.”

They parted rather awkwardly.

When Ellery woke up he found his father perched on the edge of the bed, looking at him.

“Dad. What time is it?”

“Past 5.”

Ellery stretched. “Just pull in?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Anything new in crime?”

“P.m. shows nothing so far. The cord’s a washout. It’s the other six continued.”

“How’s the atmosphere? Safe?”

“I wouldn’t say so.” Inspector Queen hugged himself as if he were cold. “They’re really laying into this one. Every line into Headquarters and City Hall jammed. The papers have taken the gloves off and they’re yelping for blood. Whatever good the announcement of your appointment did has gone up the flue with the murder of the Richardson girl. When I walked into the Mayor’s office with the Commissioner this morning to confer on the Cazalis thing His Honor practically kissed me. Phoned Cazalis then and there. First thing he said over the phone was, ‘Dr. Cazalis, when can you hold a press conference?’”

“Cazalis going to do it?”

“He’s doing it right this minute. And going on the air tonight.”

“I must be a great disappointment to His Honor.” Ellery laughed. “Now hit the sack or you’ll be a candidate for a medical conference yourself.”

The Inspector failed to move.

“There’s something else?”

“Ellery.” The old man pulled up his left leg and began slowly to untie his shoelace. “There’s been some nasty talk downtown. I wouldn’t ask you this except that if I’m to keep taking it on the chin I’ve got to know what round it is.”

“Ask me what?”

“I want you to tell me what you’ve spotted.” He began on the other shoe. “For my own information, you understand,” he explained to the shoe. “Or let me put it another way. If I’m to keep singeing my pants I want to know what the hell I’m sitting on.”

It was a kind of declaration of independence, conceived in grievance and delivered for just cause.

Ellery looked unhappy.

He reached for a cigaret and an ashtray and lay back with the tray balanced on his chest.

“All right,” he said. “From your standpoint I’m a disloyal dispenser of nothing and from your standpoint I suppose I am. Now let’s see whether what I’ve been holding out on you could prove of the slightest utility to you, me, the Mayor, the Commissioner, or the shade of Poe.

“One: Archibald Dudley Abernethy was 44 years old. Violette Smith was 42 years old. Rian O’Reilly was 40 years old. Monica McKell was 37 years old. Simone Phillips was 35 years old. Beatrice Willikins was 32 years old. Lenore Richardson was 25 years old. 44, 42, 40, 37, 35, 32, 25.”

The Inspector was staring.

“Each victim’s been younger than the victim preceding. That’s why I was so positive Dr. Cazalis couldn’t have been Number 7; he’s older than any of them. To have been seventh on the list he’d have to have been under 32, the sixth victim’s age... that is, if there was a descending-age pattern. And it turned out that Number 7, the Richardson girl, was 25, and I was right. There is a descending-age pattern. Mathematically irregular differences, but they’re always younger, younger.”

The old man gripped his right shoe. “We didn’t see that. Nobody saw it.”

“Well, it’s one of those exasperating little fragments of sense in a jumble. Like the hidden-face puzzles. You look and look, and suddenly there it is. But what does it mean? It’s sense, all right, but what sense? It springs from a cause, but what cause? It can’t conceivably be the result of coincidence; not seven! And yet the longer you examine it, the less it seems to signify. Can you think of a single satisfactory reason why anyone should go to the trouble of killing successively younger people — who haven’t the faintest connection with one another? I can’t.”

“I’s a poser, all right,” his father muttered.

“It’s true I might announce tonight that no New Yorker 25 years old or older had anything to worry about because the Cat’s going down the actuarial tables and he’s passed Age 25...”

“Very funny,” said the Inspector feebly. “It sounds like — like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan. They’d all think you were crazy and if they thought you were sane it would only pack all the anxiety down into the — the lower brackets.”

“Something like that,” nodded Ellery. “So I kept it to myself.

“Two.” He crushed the cigaret out and cradled his head, staring at the ceiling. “Of the seven victims, two have been male, five female. Until this last one, the victims have been 32 years old or older. Well past the minimum age of consent, wouldn’t you say?”

“The what?”

“I mean, we live in a connubial society. All the roads of our culture lead to the American Home, which is not conceived as the citadel of celibacy; if the point requires any proof, we have only to consider, gentlemen, the delicious sense of naughtiness we get out of the mere phrase ‘bachelor apartment.’ Our women spend their maidenhood catching a husband and the rest of their lives trying to hold on to him; our men spend their entire boyhood envying their father and consequently can’t wait when they grow up to marry the next best thing to their mother. Why do you suppose the American male is obsessed with the mammae? What I’m trying to say—”

“Well, for heaven’s sake, say it!”

“—is that if you picked seven American adults at random, all of them over 25 years of age, six of them over 32, what are the odds that all but one of them will be unmarried?”

“O’Reilly,” said the Inspector in an awed voice. “By God, O’Reilly was the only one.”

“Or you could put it another way. Of the two men, Abernethy was a bachelor and O’Reilly was married. That seemed to cancel out the men. But of the five women, all have been single! When you stop to think of it, that’s really remarkable. Five women between the ages of 42 and 25 and not one of them succeeded in the great American rat race. As in the case of the descending ages, coincidence is unthinkable. Then the Cat deliberately chooses — among his female victims, at least — only unmarried ones. Why? Inform me.”

Inspector Queen gnawed his nails. “The only thing I can think of is that he dangles the marriage bait in order to get in close. But—”

“But that just isn’t the explanation, right. No such Lothario’s turned up, or the slightest trace of one.

“Of course, I could have cried the glad tidings to Mrs. New York that the only females who need fear the embrace of the Cat are virgins, misogamists, and Lesbians, but—”

“Go on,” snarled his father.

“Three: Abernethy was strangled with a blue silk cord, Violette Smith with a salmon-colored one, O’Reilly blue, Monica McKell salmon, Simone Phillips salmon, Beatrice Willikins salmon, Lenore Richardson salmon. There’s even a report on that.”

Mumbled the Inspector: “I’d forgotten that.”

“One color for the males, another for the females. Consistently. Why?”

After a time the Inspector said, rather timidly: “The other day, son, you mentioned a fourth point...”

“Oh. Yes. They all had phones.”

His father rubbed an eye.

“In a way, the very prosiness of the point makes it the most provocative. To me, anyway. Seven victims, seven phones. Even Simone, the poor cripple. They all had phones or, where the subscriber was someone else — as in the cases of Lenore Richardson, Simone Phillips, and Monica McKell — they had separate listings in the directory; I checked.

“I don’t know the figures, but I should imagine there’s a ratio of some twenty-five phones in the United States per hundred population. One out of four. In the big urban centers, like New York, the percentage may be greater. Let’s say in New York one out of three. Yet of the seven victims tagged by the Cat, not one, not two, not four, but all seven had phones.

“The first explanation to suggest itself is that the Cat picks his dainties out of the phone book. Pure lottery. But in a lottery the odds against picking seven victims successively each of whoms turns out to be younger than the last would be literally incalculable. Then the Cat makes his selections on some other basis.

“Still, all his victims are listed in the Manhattan directory. Those phones are a point, a point.”

Ellery set the ashtray on his night table and swung his legs off the bed to squat, mourner-fashion. “It’s damnable,” he moaned. “If there were one break in the sequence — one victim older than the last, one woman strangled who was married or who’d ever been married, one man found necktied in salmon — or heliotrope! — one who didn’t have a phone... Those points in common exist for reasons. Or maybe,” said Ellery, sitting up suddenly, “or maybe the points in common exist for the same reason. A sort of great common denominator. The Rosetta stone. One key to all the doors. Do you know, that would be nice.”

But Inspector Queen was mumbling as he stripped. “That getting-younger business. When you think of it... Two years’ difference in age between Abernethy and Violette. Two years between Vi and O’Reilly. Three years between O’Reilly and McKell’s sister. Two years between her and Celeste’s sister. Three years between her and Beatrice Willikins. Two and three. Never more than three. In six cases. And then-”

“Yes,” said Ellery, “and then Lenore Richardson and we find a jump in the age differential from a previous maximal three to seven... That haunted me all last night.”

And now the Inspector was denuded, his little sexagenarian hide impaled on the point of a needle.

“What’s haunting me,” he mumbled, “is who’s next?”

Ellery turned away.

“And that’s all you had, son?”

“That’s all I have.”

“I’m going to bed.” The little naked man shuffled out.