Cat of Many Tails

6

The Cazalis phase of the investigation ran into shoal water immediately.

As originally charted by Dr. Cazalis, the psychiatric inquiry was to be a fishing expedition of all the specializing physicians in the local field, a sort of grand fleet sailing under a unified command. But it became evident that the expedition would have to be remapped. Each specialist, it appeared, was his own captain, guarding his nets and lines and the secrets of his fishing grounds with Japanese zeal. He regarded his catch as his exceptional property and no other fisher should have them.

To the credit of most, their scruples were largely ethical. The sanctity of the physician-patient confessional could not, in propria persona, be invaded even by other physicians. Dr. Cazalis surmounted the first obstacle by proposing the adoption of a published-case history technique. Each psychiatrist was to go through his files, select his possibilities on the broadest base, and make transcripts in which all identifying allusions were to be altered, leaving only the initials of the patient for reference. This suggestion was approved. When the case histories came in a five-doctor central board, headed by Dr. Cazalis, was to go work. The board was to consider each history, rejecting those which in the consultative view were unlikely. By this method many persons would be screened out while being spared the violation of their privacy.

Here, however, agreement went aground.

How were the remaining cases to be treated? Anonymity could be preserved only so far. Then names must be disclosed.

The inquiry almost foundered on this reef.

For therapeutic reasons the type and class of suspect Dr. Cazalis’s plan involved could not be handled as the police handled the drily haul of the dragnet, even assuming that the problem of protecting the confidences of the consulting room could be solved. Inspector Queen was directing and co-ordinating the activities of over three hundred detectives under orders to stop at nothing. Since early June each morning’s lineup had been crowded not merely with dope addicts, alcoholics, old sex offenders, and criminal psychopaths with penal or institutional records but also with vagrants, prowlers, “suspicious characters” of all descriptions — a category which in three months had swollen alarmingly from the internal pressures of the case. In the high prevailing temperature, civil rights had tended to shrink as official frustration expanded. There had been typhoons of protest from all quarters. The courts had been showered with writs. Citizens had howled, politicians had roared, judges had thundered. But the investigation was plunging ahead in the teeth of all this. Dr. Cazalis’s colleagues would have been reluctant to submit their patients to normal police procedures; how, they demanded, could they be expected to turn their patients over to the authorities in this stormy, overheated atmosphere? To many of their charges even an ordinary questioning session would raise dangers. These people were under treatment for mental and emotional disorders. The work of months or years might be undone in an hour by detectives callously intent only on finding a connection between the suspect and the Cat.

There were other difficulties. The patients originated for the most part in the prominences of the cultural geography. Many were socially well-known or came from well-known families. The arts and sciences were heavily represented, the theatrical world, business, finance, even politics. Democracy or no democracy, said the psychiatrists, such people could not be thrown into the lineup as if they were poolroom loiterers or park prowlers. How were they to be questioned? How far might the questions go? Which questions should be avoided and who was to decide? And who was to do the questioning, and when, and where?

The whole thing, they said, was impossible. It took the better part of the week to work out a plan satisfactory to the majority. The solution took-shape when it was recognized that no single modus operandi was practicable. There would have to be a separate plan, as it were, for each patient.

Accordingly a list of key questions, carefully composed so as to conceal their origin and objective, was drawn up by Dr. Cazalis and his board in collaboration with Inspector Queen. Each doctor co-operating received a confidential copy of this list. The individual physician was to do his own questioning, in his own office, of those patients on his suspect roll whom he considered it therapeutically risky to turn over to others. He agreed to file reports of these sessions with the board. Patients who in the judgment of their doctors could be safely interviewed by others were to be handled directly by the board at any one of their several offices. The police were not to come into contact with any patient except in the final stage of the medical inquiry, and then only where the findings compelled it. Even at this point the procedure was to emphasize the protection of the patient rather than the overriding hunt for damaging facts. Wherever possible in these cases the investigation was to proceed around the suspect instead of through him.

To the police it was a clumsy and irritating plan; but as Dr. Cazalis, who had begun to look haggard, pointed out to the Police Commissioner and Inspector Queen, the alternative was no investigation at all. The Inspector threw up his hands and his superior said politely that he had been looking forward to a rather more alluring prospect.

So, it appeared, had the Mayor. At an unhappy meeting in City Hall, Dr. Cazalis was inflexible: there were to be no further interviews with the press on his part or on the part of anyone associated with him in the psychiatric phase of the investigation. “I gave my professional word on that, Mr. Mayor. Let one patient’s name leak to the newpapers and the whole thing will blow up in my face.”

The Mayor replied with a plaintive, “Yes, yes, Dr. Cazalis, I hadn’t thought it through, I’m sure. Good luck, and keep right on it, won’t you?”

But when the psychiatrist had left, the Mayor remarked bitterly to his private secretary, “It’s that damned Ellery Queen business all over again. By the way, Birdy, whatever happened to that fellow?”

What had happened was that the Mayor’s Special Investigator had taken to the streets. Ellery might have been seen these days — and he was seen, by various Headquarters men — at eccentric hours lounging on the sidewalk across from the building on East 19th Street where Archibald Dudley Abernethy had come to an end, or standing in the hall outside the ex-Abernethy apartment, which was now occupied by a Guatemalan member of the United Nations secretariat and his wife, or wandering about Gramercy Park and Union Square; silently consuming pizza in the Italian restaurant on West 44th Street over which Violette Smith had flirted successfully with death, or leaning against the banister of the top floor hall listening to a piano stammer along behind the apartment door to which was thumbtacked a large sign:

poking about beneath the staircase in the lobby of a Chelsea tenement at the spot where the body of Rian O’Reilly had been found; sitting on a bench at the end of the Sheridan Square subway-station platform, uptown side, with the shade of Madcap Monica McKell; prowling beneath the washlines in a certain rear court on East 102nd Street and never once catching a glimpse of the emancipated cousin of fat little Simone Phillips; standing before the brassrailed stoop of a house on West 128th Street in a swarm of dark children, or strolling down Lenox Avenue among brown and saffron people to the 110th Street entrance to Central Park, or sitting on a park bench not far from the entrance or on the nearby boulder which had been the rock, if not the salvation, of Beatrice Willikins; or trudging along East 84th Street from Fifth Avenue to Madison past the canopied entrance of the Park-Lester and up Madison and back again to circumambulate the block, or taking the private elevator in the Park-Lester’s neighbor to a boarded-up penthouse whose occupants were away for the summer to stare frankly across the parapet at the terrace beyond which Lenore Richardson had gripped Forever Amber in the convulsion of strangulation.

Ellery rarely spoke to anyone on these excursions.

They took place by day as well as by night, as if he wished to view the sites in both perspectives.

He returned to the seven localities again and again. Once he was picked up by a detective who did not know him and spent several hours as a suspicious character in the nearest precinct house before Inspector Queen hurried in to identify him.

Had he been asked what he was about, the Mayor’s Special Investigator would have been at a loss for a communicable reply. It was difficult to put into words. How materialize a terror, much more see him whole? This was one whose feet had whispered over pavements, displacing nothing larger than molecules. You followed his trackless path, sniffing upwind, hopefully.

All that week the eighth tail of the Cat, the now familiar question mark, hooked and held the eye of New York.

Ellery was walking up Park Avenue. It was the Saturday night after Lenore Richardson’s murder and he was drifting in a vacuum.

He had left the night life of the City behind. In the 70s only piles of articulated stone kept him company, and an occasional goldbraided doorman.

At 78th Street Ellery paused before the royal blue-awninged house where the Cazalises lived. The ground-floor Cazalis apartment, with its private office entrance directly off the street, showed lights, but the vanes of the Venetian blinds were closed and Ellery wondered if Dr. Cazalis and his fellow-psychiatrists were at work behind them. Brewing the potion, stirring the caldron; wrapping truth in darkness. They would never find the Cat in their co-wizard’s notes. He did not know how he knew this, but he knew it.

He walked on and some time later found himself turning into 84th Street.

But he passed the Park-Lester without breaking the rhythm of his torpor.

At the corner of 84th and Fifth, Ellery stopped. It was still early, the evening was warm, but the Avenue was a nervous emptiness. Where were the Saturday night arm-in-arm strollers? Even the automobile traffic seemed lighter. And the busses whined by carrying remarkably few passengers.

Facing him across Fifth Avenue was the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a broadbeamed old lady sitting patiently in darkness.

He crossed over on the green light and began to walk uptown along the old lady’s flank. Beyond her lay the black and silent Park.

They’re beginning to stick to the well-lighted areas, he thought. O comfort-killing night, image of Hell. No friendly darkness now. Especially here. In this part of the jungle the beast had pounced twice. He almost cried out at the touch on his arm. “Sergeant.”

“I tailed you for two blocks before I recognized you,” said Sergeant Velie, falling into step.

“On duty tonight?”

“Naw.”

“Then what are you doing around here?”

“Oh... just walking around.” The big fellow said carelessly, “I’m baching it these days.”

“Why, where’s your family, Velie?”

“Sent the wife and kid to my mother-in-law’s for a month.”

“To Cincinnati? Is Barbara-Ann—?”

“No, Barbsy’s okay. And as far as school is concerned,” said Sergeant Velie argumentatively, “she can catch up any time. She’s got her ma’s brains.”

“Oh,” said Ellery; and they ambled on in silence.

After a long time the Sergeant said, “I’m not intruding on anything, I trust?”

“No.”

“I mean, I thought you might be on the prowl.” The Sergeant laughed.

“Just going over the Cat’s route. For the umpteenth time. Backwards, Sergeant. Richardson, Lenore, to Willikins, Beatrice. Number 7 to Number 6. East 84th to Harlem. The Lord’s anointed to His unshorn lamb. One mile or so between and the Cat jumps it by way of the moon. Do you have a light?”

They stopped under a street lamp and the Sergeant struck a match.

“Talking about the Cat’s route,” he said. “You know, Maestro, I’ve been giving this case a lot of thought.”

“Thanks, Velie.”

They crossed 96th Street.

“I long ago gave up,” the Sergeant was saying — “I’m speaking only for Thomas Velie, you understand — gave up trying to get anywhere on this carrousel. My personal opinion is when the Cat’s knocked off it will be by dumb-bunny luck. Some rookie cop’ll walk up to a drunk bent over like he’s regretting the whole thing and bingo, it’ll be the Cat tying a bow in the latest neck. But just the same,” said the Sergeant, “you can’t help figuring the angles.”

“No,” said Ellery, “you certainly can’t.”

“Now I don’t know what your impression is, and of course this is all off the record, but I got busy the other night with a map of Manhattan and environs that I traced off my kid’s geography book and I started spotting in the locations of the seven homicides. Just for the hell of it.” The Sergeant’s voice lowered. “Well, sir, I think I got something.”

“What?” asked Ellery. A couple were passing, the man arguing and pointing to the Park and the woman shaking her head, walking very fast. The Sergeant stopped abruptly; but Ellery said, “It’s all right, Velie. That’s only a Saturday night date with ideas.”

“Yeah,” said the Sergeant sagely, “sex suckers all men.”

But they did not move until they saw the man and woman climb into a southbound bus.

“You’d got something, Velie.”

“Oh! Yeah. I put a heavy dot on each location on the map, see. The first one — Abernethy’s, East 19th — I marked that one 1. The second one — Violette Smith’s on West 44th off Times Square — I mark 2. And so forth.”

“You,” said Ellery, “and that Extra cartoonist.”

“Then when I’ve got all seven spotted and numbered, I begin drawing lines. A line from 1 to 2. A line from 2 to 3. Et cetera. And what do you think?”

“What?”

“It’s got a kind of a design.”

“Really? No, wait, Sergeant. The Park gives me nothing tonight. Let’s strike crosstown.” They crossed 99th and began to make their way east through the dark and quiet street. “Design?”

“Look.” Sergeant Velie pulled a wad of tracing paper from his pocket and unfolded it on the corner of 99th and Madison. “It’s a kind of double-circular movement, Maestro. Straight up from 1 to 2, sharp down again but westerly from 2 to 3, keeps going southwest to 4, then what? Sharp up again. A long one this time, crossing the 1–2 line. Up, down, over and up again. Now look! Now it starts all over again! Oh, not at exactly the same angles, of course, but close enough to be interesting, hmmm? Again it’s up and over from 5 to 6 — northwesterly — then sharp down to 7...” The Sergeant paused. “Let me show you something. If you assume there’s a sort of scheme behind this, if you continue that same circular movement, what do you find?” The Sergeant pointed to his dotted line. “You can predict just about where Number 8’s going to come! Maestro, I’d almost bet the next one’s in the Bronx.” He folded his piece of paper, restored it carefully to his pocket, and they resumed their eastward way. “Maybe up around the beginning of the Grand Concourse. Around Yankee Stadium or some place like that.” And after a few moments, the Sergeant asked, “What do you think?” Ellery frowned at the passing sidewalk. “There’s a little thing that comes out of The Hunting of the Snark, Sergeant,” he said, “that’s always stuck in my mind.

“I don’t get it,” said Sergeant Velie, staring at him.

“I’m afraid we all have our favorite maps. I had one recently I was extremely attached to, Sergeant. It was a Graph of Intervals. The intervals between the various murders expressed in number of days. The result was something that looked like a large question mark lying flat on its face. It was a lesson in humility. I burned it, and I advise you to do the same with yours.”

After that, the Sergeant just strode along, muttering occasionally.

“Why, look where we are,” said Ellery.

The Sergeant, who had been acting dignified, started as he glanced up at the street sign.

“So you see, Sergeant, it’s the detective who returns to the scene of the crime. Drawn by a sort of horizontal gravity.”

“Drawn by my garter belt. You knew just where you were going.”

“Unconsciously, maybe. Shall we press our luck?”

“Last one in is a dirty name,” said the Sergeant, unbending and they plunged into the noisy breakers of 102nd Street.

“I wonder how my female ex-Irregular is getting along.”

“Say, I heard about that. That was a pretty smart trick.”

“Not so smart. The shortest collaboration on record. — Hold it, Velie.”

Ellery stopped to fish for a cigaret. The Sergeant dutifully struck a match, saying, “Where?”

“In that doorway behind me. Almost missed him.”

The flame snuffed out and Sergeant Velie said in a loud voice, “Darn it all, old man, let’s pet on over here,” and they moved around a frantic hopscotch game toward the building line. The big man pinned. “Hell, it’s Pigpott.” He struck another match near the doorway and Ellery bent over.

“Evening, evening,” said the detective from somewhere. “I saw you two amateurs coming a block away.”

“Is there a law against it?” demanded Sergeant Velie. “What are you working tonight, Piggo? Yeah, I’ll have one.” He took a cigaret from Ellery.

“Watch it! Here he comes.”

Ellery and the Sergeant jumped into the doorway beside the Headquarters man. A tall fellow had come out of an unlighted vestibule halfway up the street, on the side. He began pushing his way through the children.

“I’ve been tailing him all night,” said the detective.

“On whose orders, Piggott?”

“Your old man’s.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“All week. Hesse and I are divvying him.”

“Didn’t the Inspector tell you?” asked Sergeant Velie.

“I’ve hardly seen him this week.”

“It’s nothing exciting,” said the detective. “Just satisfying the taxpayers, the Inspector said.”

“How’s he been spending his time?”

“Walking and standing still.”

“Up here much?”

“Till last night.”

“What’s he been up to in that vestibule tonight?”

“Watching the entrance of the girl’s house across the street.”

Ellery nodded. Then he said, “Is she home?”

“We all pulled in here about a half hour ago. She spent the evening in the 42nd Street Library. Reference Room. So that’s where we were, too. Then he tailed her here, and I tailed him, and here we are.”

“Has he gone in there?”

“No, sir.”

“He hasn’t approached her, spoken to her?”

“Hell, she didn’t know he was following her. It’s been kind of like a Humphrey Bogart movie, at that. Johnson’s been tailing her. He’s been in the back court across the street since we pulled in here.”

“Sounds like a Canarsie clambake.” Then the Sergeant said swiftly, “Piggo, get lost.”

The tall man was coming directly toward their doorway.

“Well, well,” said Ellery, stepping out. “Hi.”

“I thought I’d save you some wear and tear.” Jimmy McKell stood innerbraced, looking from Ellery to Sergeant Velie and back again. Behind them, the doorway was empty. “What’s the significant idea?”

“Idea?” said Ellery, considering it.

“I saw you two rubberheels sneak into this doorway. What are you doing, watching Celeste Phillips?”

“Not me,” said Ellery. “Were you, Sergeant?”

“I wouldn’t do a thing like that,” said the Sergeant.

“Very funny.” Jimmy McKell kept looking at them. “Why don’t you ask me what I’m doing here?”

“All right, Jimmy. What are you doing here?”

“The same thing you are.” Jimmy excavated a cigaret, brushed off the linty detritus, and stuck it like a flag between his lips. His tone was amiable, however. “Only my angle is maybe different. I’m told there’s somebody doing the town collecting necks. Now that woman has one of the prettiest head supports in Christendom.” He lit the cigaret.

“Protecting her, huh?” said the Sergeant. “You play long shots, reporter.”

“Two-Million-to-One McKell, they call me.” Jimmy tossed the match; it glanced off Velie’s ear. “Well, I’ll be seeing you. If that’s my kismet.” He began to walk away.

“Jimmy, wait.”

“For what?”

“What do you say we drop in on her?”

Jimmy sauntered back. “For what?”

“I’ve been meaning to have a talk with you two.”

“For what?”

“You’re both entitled to an explanation, Jimmy.”

“You don’t have to explain anything to me. My nose knows.”

“No kidding.”

“I’m not. It really does.”

“I don’t blame you for being griped—”

“Hell, who’s griped? What’s a little thing like being suspected of seven murders? I mean between pals?” He stepped close all at once and Sergeant Velie stirred. Jimmy’s lips were out. “Queen, that was the most two-faced, poisonous deal since the days of the Medicis. To sick me onto Celeste and Celeste onto me. I ought to boff you for that.”

The Sergeant said, “Here.”

“Take that ham hock off me.”

“It’s all right, Sergeant.” Ellery was preoccupied and morose. “But Jimmy, I had to make some test.”

“Some test is right.”

“Yes, it was on the silly side. But you both came to me at such a convenient moment. I couldn’t close my eyes to the possibility that one of you—”

“Is the Cat.” Jimmy laughed.

“We’re not dealing with normality.”

“Do I look abnormal? Does Celeste?”

“Not to my eyes, no. But then I don’t have psychiatric vision.” Ellery grinned. “And dementia, for example, is a youthful disease.”

“Praecox McKell. Well, they called me a lot worse in the late Hot War.”

“Jimmy, I never really believed it. I don’t believe it now.”

“But there’s always the mathematical chance.”

“Come on, let’s drop in on Celeste.”

“I take it if I refuse,” said Jimmy, not budging, “Charley the Anthropoid here will pinch me?”

“I’ll pinch you,” said Sergeant Velie. “Where it hurts.”

“See what I mean?” said Jimmy bitterly. “We’re just not compatible.” And he strode away, breaking up the hopscotch game and pursued by the curses of little children.

“Let him go, Velie.”

After a few moments Detective Piggott’s voice said, “There goes my bread and butter. Night, Brother Elks.” When they looked around, Piggott was gone.

“So he’s been watching Celeste to save her from the Cat,” said Ellery as they began to cross the street.

“In a swine’s eyeball,”

“Oh, Jimmy means it, Sergeant. At least he thinks he does.”

“What is he, feebleminded?”

“Hardly.” Ellery laughed. “But he’s suffering from a severe attack of what our friend Cazalis might call — though I doubt it — confusional inanity. Otherwise known as the love psychosis.”

The Sergeant grunted. They stopped before the tenement and he looked around casually. “You know what I think, Maestro?”

“After that double wingback map of Manhattan of yours I wouldn’t even attempt a guess.”

“Go ahead and horse,” said the Sergeant. “But I think you put a bee in his buzzer.”

“Explain.”

“I think maybe McKell thinks maybe Celeste is the Cat.”

Ellery glanced up at the behemoth as if he had never really seen him before.

“You know what I think, Velie?”

“What?”

“I think you’re right.” And, looking slightly ill, he said, “Let’s go in.”

The hall was cheaply dim and pungent. A boy and a girl jumped apart as Ellery and Velie walked in; they had been clutching each other in the shadows beside the staircase. “Oh, thank you, I had such a lovely time,” said the girl, running up the stairs. The boy smirked. “I ain’t complaining, Carole.” He slouched out, winking at the two men.

A door at the rear stood open, a line of wash clipping its upper corner to the dark sky.

“Piggott said Johnson was out there, Maestro.”

“Not any more Johnson isn’t,” said a voice from under the stairs. “I got an old camp chair in here, Sarge.”

‘“Lo, Johnson,” said the Sergeant, not turning. “How’s the trick?”

“With those two juvenile delinquents that were just here it was colossal. You calling on C.P.?”

“Is she still up?” Ellery asked the darkness.

“There’s the light under her door, Mr. Queen.”

“That door there,” said the Sergeant.

“Alone, Johnson?”

“Uh-huh.” There was a yawn.

Ellery went over and knocked on the door. Sergeant Velie moved to one side, out of range.

After a moment, Ellery knocked again.

“Who is it?” She sounded frightened.

“Ellery Queen. Please open, Celeste.”

They heard her undo the latch chain very slowly.

“What do you want?”

In the box of light she stood bristling. One hand clutched a large book to her breast. It looked like an old book, one fingered with respect.

Survey of English Literature — First Year.

Saturday night on East 102nd Street. A voom with the Venerable Bede. Bebop with Beowulf. Holding hands with Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages. Jive print in double columns, kneedeep in footnotes.

She blocked his view of the room. He had never seen this room, only photographs.

She was dressed in a full black pleated skirt and a tailored white blouse and her hair was disordered, as if she had had her fists in it as she read. There was blue ink on one finger. What he could make out of her face was a little shocking. The violet stains had spread and her skin was blotchy, cupped to bitter heads.

“May I come in?” asked Ellery with a smile.

“No. What do you want?”

“In this neighborhood, Maestro,” said Sergeant Velie, “you couldn’t run for your life.”

Celeste took a quick look out. She immediately withdrew her head. “I remember him.”

Sergeant Velie stiffened.

“Haven’t you done enough damage?”

“Celeste—”

“Or did you come to arrest me? Not that I’d put it past you. I suppose Jimmy McKell and I were accomplices. We strangled all those people together. Each of us pulling on one end of the silk cords.”

“Celeste, if you’ll let me-”

“You’ve spoiled everything. Everything.”

The door slammed in his face. They heard the furious turn of the key, the lash of the latch chain.

“Each on one end,” mused Sergeant Velie. “Think that’s such a crosseyed idea? Did anybody take that into consideration? Two of them?”

Ellery muttered, “They’ve had a blowup.”

“Sure, last night. It was just terrible,” said Johnson’s voice cheerfully. “He says she suspected him of being the Cat and she says nonono it’s him who suspected her of being the Cat. Then they both deny it like mad. Going at it hot and heavy — I was out in the court there and I was afraid they’d collect a crowd and I’d have to fade. Well, sir, she starts bawling like she means it and what does he do but say a naughty word and damn near bust the hinges off the door blasting his way out.”

“Love’s sweet young stuff,” said the Sergeant. “Do you suppose it could have been an act? Maybe they’re wise to you, Johnson. Hey, Maestro. Where you going?”

Ellery sounded miserable. “Home.”

All during the week following Ellery had a sense of marking time. Nothing occurred of the least interest. He saw the reports on Jimmy McKell and Celeste Phillips; they had made up, they had quarreled again, they had made up again. Other reports had all but stopped coming in. One morning Ellery dropped in to view the lineup performance. As entertainment it was depressing, and it told nothing, but he experienced the satisfaction of a man who has performed a duty. He did not go again. He cleverly refrained from venturing below Centre Street and the good Magistrate at City Hall seemed to have forgotten his existence, for which Ellery was abysmally grateful. He saw little of his father and he purposely avoided asking questions about the progress of Dr. Cazalis’s investigation... And the Cat’s eighth tail remained a question mark on the front page of the Extra.

Even the newspapers were marking time.

It was curious. The status quo ante in American journalism is not a standing still; it is a going backward. A Page 1 story remains there only so long as it grows. Let it stop growing and it finds itself on Page 6, and it will continue this oblivious process until it backs right out of the paper. But the Cat story blandly bucked the rule. If it got nowhere, neither did it lose headway. It rode anchor on the front page. It was news even when it was not.

In a way, it was more news when it was not than when it was, when the Cat lay napping in his den than when he padded out to hunt another neck. His inactivity exerted a special attraction, horrid and hypnotic: the magnetism of suspense. It was like a smolder between bursts of flame. If, as Jefferson said, newspapers “serve to carry off noxious vapors and smoke,” the New York press could only obey the physics of the times.

It was during these intervals that the public nervousness was most remarkable. The waiting was worse than the event. When the Cat killed, people were actually relieved for a few days, in a semi-hysterical way; they and theirs were safe once more. But their dread was not destroyed; it was merely becalmed. Relief soon wore off, suspense surfaced again, the night anxieties, the counting of the days, the pitching wonder as to who would be next.

It was no use pitting the mathematical improbabilities against the individual’s fears. The psychological laws of lottery ruled, the only difference being that in this policy game the prize was not money but extinction. Tickets were free to all New Yorkers, and each holder knew in his heart he would win at the next drawing.

So the week wore on.

Ellery was thankful to see the week end; by Saturday it had become insupportable. His absurd Graph of Intervals persisted in haunting him. Between Victims 1 and 2, nineteen days; between Victims 2 and 3, twenty-six days; between Victims 3 and 4, twenty-two days; between Victims 4 and 5 — Monica McKell to Simone Phillips — the teasing, inexplicable drop to six days; and then the reascending curve of eleven days between Victims 6 and 7. Was this the beginning of a new upward spiral? Were the intervals leveling off? It was now the twelfth day after the strangling of Mrs. Cazalis’s niece.

In the uncertainty, each moment excreted fear.

Ellery spent that Saturday chasing police calls. It was the first time he had used any of the vague powers conferred on him by the Mayor’s appointment. He was not even sure it would work. But when he commandeered a car with a police radio, a black seven-passenger limousine with no identifying insignia occupied by a plainclothes chauffeur and his plainclothes companion showed up promptly. Most of the time Ellery slumped low in the tonneau listening to interminable accounts of “real baffling cases.” Each detective was the size of Sergeant Velie and each was equipped with inexhaustible lungs.

Ellery kept wondering on and off through the long tiresome day what had happened to his father. No one seemed to know where Inspector Queen was; he had left the apartment before Ellery rose, he had not been to Headquarters, he had not called in.

They roared with open siren from the Battery to the Harlem River, from Riverside Drive to First Avenue. They were in on the breakup of a teenage street fight in San Juan Hill and the arrest of a cocaine addict caught trying to slip a forged prescription by an alert Yorkville pharmacist. They visited the scenes of holdups, traffic accidents, minor assaults; on the agenda in order were a queue-pulling match off Chatham Square, an attempted rape in a Hell’s Kitchen hallway, the case of a getaway car in a Third Avenue pawnshop robbery. They witnessed the bloodless capture of a meek gangster in Little Italy wanted for questioning in an old homicide, the escape of a Lithuanian cook from a Little Hungary restaurant where he had suddenly gone berserk. There were four suicides — above the average for such a short period, the detectives explained, but it had been a bad summer, one in the Bowling Green subway station, an elderly Brooklynite who had thrown himself in the path of an incoming IRT express; another a Herald Square window-jumping case, a girl registered in a hotel from Chicopee Falls, Mass., identified as an eloper; another a gas range job in a Rivington Street tenement, a woman and a baby; the fourth an alcoholic case in the West 130s who had slashed his wrists. There were two homicide calls: the first, shortly before noon, a knifing in a Harlem poolroom; the second, at 6:30, a woman beaten to death with a Stillson wrench in the East 50s by her husband, an advertising agency executive. This last aroused some interest in the detectives since it involved another man, a Broadway character, and they were disposed to finger; but Ellery waved them on.

There were no strangulations, with or without cords.

“Just another day,” said the detective at the wheel as he slid the squad car into 87th Street. He sounded apologetic.

“Why not keep going tonight?” suggested the other detective as Ellery got out. “Saturday night’s always lively, Mr. Queen, and maybe it’s the Cat’s night out.”

“By the twitching of my left ventricle,” said Ellery, “I can tell it isn’t. Doesn’t matter, anyway — I can always read about it in the papers. Will you boys join me in a friendly glass?”

“Well, now,” said the driver.

But the other detective said, “Give your old woman a break for once, Frank. And I’ve got a long haul, Mr. Queen. Out to Rockville Center. Thanks just the same.”

Upstairs, Ellery found a note from his father.

It was a scribble marked 7 P.M.

7:35.

Ellery ran.

When the uniformed maid ushered him into the Cazalis living room, the first person he saw was the Mayor of the City of New York. That harrowed servant of the people was lying back in an easychair, hands clasped about a tall glass, glaring at a bust of Sigmund Freud above Ellery’s head.

The Police Commissioner, seated beside the Mayor, was studying the fume of his cigar.

Dr. Cazalis sat on a Turkish divan, bolstered by silk pillows. His wife held on to his hand.

At a window stood Inspector Queen, cocooned in silence.

The air was chill.

“Don’t tell me, please,” said Ellery. “It’s a washout.”

No one replied. Mrs. Cazalis rose and prepared a Scotch-and-soda, which Ellery accepted with genuine gratitude.

“Ellery, where have you been today?” But the Inspector failed to sound as if he cared.

“Out chasing radio calls. Don’t be misled, Mr. Mayor,” said Ellery. “It’s the first time since I took over. Hereafter I’ll do my special investigating from an armchair — that is, if there is a hereafter?”

The Mayor’s glance touched him briefly, almost with loathing. “Sit down, Queen, sit down.”

“Nobody’s answered my question.”

“It wasn’t a question, it was a statement,” said Dr. Cazalis from the pillows. “And as a statement it exactly states the case.”

“Sit down, Queen,” snapped the Mayor again.

“Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I’ll keep my father company.” Ellery was startled by Dr. Cazalis’s appearance. His pale eyes were inflamed and his skin was plowed so raw that Ellery thought of floodwater soil eroded into gullies; the glacier had given way. And he recalled Cazalis’s remark about his insomnia. “Doctor, you look depreciated.”

“There’s been considerable wear and tear.”

“He’s worn out,” said Mrs. Cazalis shrilly. “He drives himself so. No more sense than an infant. He’s been at this day and night since...”

Her husband squeezed her hand. “The whole psychiatric attack, Mr. Queen, is a fizzle. We’ve got exactly nowhere.”

Inspector Queen said curtly: “This week I’ve been working close to Dr. Cazalis, Ellery. We wound up today. There were a number of possibilities. We ran every one of them down.”

“Quietly, you understand,” said the Mayor bitterly. “No toes stepped on. Not a word in the papers.”

“Well,” said Dr. Cazalis, “it was a long chance at best. My fault entirely. It seemed a notion at the time.”

“At the time, Edward? Isn’t it still?” Mrs. Cazalis was regarding her husband in a puzzled way.

“Humpty Dumpty, dear.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I take it, Queen,” said the Mayor, “you haven’t got to first base?”

“I never took the bat off my shoulder, Mr. Mayor.”

“I see.” Here goes a Special Investigator, thought Ellery. “Inspector Queen, what’s your feeling?”

“We have a very touchy case, Mr. Mayor. In the usual murder investigation, the range of suspicion is limited. The husband, the ‘friend,’ the handyman, the rival, the enemy, and so on. Motive begins to stick out. The field narrows. Opportunity narrows it even further. We’ve got human material to work on. Sooner or later in even the most complicated case we make a rap stick. But in this one... How are you going to narrow the field? Where do you start? No connection among the victims anywhere. No suspects. No clues. Every murder a dead end. The Cat could be anybody in New York.”

“You can still say that, Inspector?” cried the Mayor. “After all these weeks?”

The Inspector’s lips thinned. “I’m ready to hand in my shield right now.”

“No, no, Inspector, I was just thinking aloud.” The Mayor glanced at his Police Commissioner. “Well, Barney, where do we go from here?”

The Commissioner tapped a long ash very carefully into a tray. “When you get right down to it, there’s no place we can go. We’ve done, and we’re doing, everything humanly possible. I could suggest a new Police Commissioner, Jack, but I doubt if that would satisfy anybody except the Extra and the other crowd, and I’m Irish enough to believe it wouldn’t necessarily bag your Cat, either.”

The Mayor waved, impatiently. “The question is, are we doing everything possible? It seems to me where we may have gone off is in assuming that the Cat is a New Yorker. Suppose he comes from Bayonne? Stamford? Yonkers? He may be a commuter—”

“Or a Californian,” said Ellery.

“What? What was that?” exclaimed the Mayor.

“A Californian, or an Illinoisan, or a Hawaiian.”

The Mayor said irritably, “Queen, I can’t see that that sort of talk gets us anywhere. The point is, Barney, have we done anything outside the City?”

“Everything we can.”

“We’ve had every community within a radius of fifty miles of the City alerted for at least six weeks,” said the Inspector. “From the start they’ve been requested to keep their eyes peeled for psychos. But so far—”

“Jack, until we get a concrete reason for believing otherwise, nobody can crucify us for concentrating on Manhattan.”

“My personal opinion,” added the Inspector, “has been all along that he’s a Manhattanite. To me this Cat smells local.”

“Besides, Jack,” said the Commissioner with a certain dryness, “our jurisdiction ends at the City limits. After that we’ve got a tin cup in our hands and take what the saints provide.”

The Mayor set his glass down with a little bang and went over to the fireplace. Ellery was nuzzling his Scotch with a faraway look, the Commissioner was back at his cigar examination, Dr. Cazalis and Inspector Queen were blinking at each other across the room to keep awake, and Mrs. Cazalis sat like a grenadier.

The Mayor turned suddenly. “Dr. Cazalis, what are the chances of extending your psychiatric investigation to include the entire metropolitan area?”

“Manhattan, is the concentration point.”

“But there are other psychiatrists outside?”

“Oh, yes.”

“What about them?”

“Well... it would take months, and then you wouldn’t get anything like satisfactory coverage. Even here, in the heart of things, where I exert a pretty direct professional influence, I haven’t been able to get better than 65 to 70 per cent of the men in the field to co-operate. If the survey were extended to Westchester, Long Island, Connecticut, New Jersey...” Dr. Cazalis shook his head. “As far as I personally am concerned, Mr. Mayor, it would be pretty much out of the question. I haven’t either the strength or the time to tackle such a project.”

Mrs. Cazalis’s lips parted.

“Won’t you at least continue covering Manhattan, then, Dr. Cazalis? The answer may well lie in the files of one of the 30 or 35 per cent you say refused to play along. Won’t you keep after those people?”

Dr. Cazalis’s fingers pumped rapidly. “Well, I’ve been hoping...”

“Edward, you’re not giving up. You’re not!”

“Et tu, darling? I thought I had no more sense than an infant.”

“I mean for going at it the way you have. Ed, how can you stop altogether? Now?”

“Why, dear, simply by doing so. I was paranoid to attempt it.”

She said something in such a low tone that Dr. Cazalis said, “What, dear?”

“I said what about Lenore!”

She was on her feet.

“Darling.” Dr. Cazalis scrambled off the divan. “All this tonight’s upset you—”

“Tonight? Did you think I wasn’t upset yesterday? And the day before?” She sobbed into her hands. “If Lenore had been your sister’s child... had meant as much to you as she did to me...”

“I think, gentlemen,” said the Mayor quickly, “we’ve imposed on Mrs. Cazalis’s hospitality long enough.”

“I’m sorry!” She was really trying to stop. “I’m so sorry. Edward, let me go. Please. I want to... get something.”

“Tell you what, darling. Give me twenty-four hours’ sleep, a two-inch T-bone when I wake up, and I’ll tackle it where I left off. Good enough?”

She kissed him suddenly. Then, murmuring something, she hurried out.

“I submit, gentlemen,” said the Mayor, “that we owe Mrs. Cazalis a few dozen roses.”

“My only weakness,” laughed the psychiatrist. “I never could resist the diffusion of the female lachrymal glands.”

“Then, Doctor,” said Ellery, “you may be in for a bad time.”

“How’s that, Mr. Queen?”

“If you’ll run over the ages of the seven victims, you’ll find that each victim had been younger than the one preceding.”

The Commissioner’s cigar almost fell out of his mouth.

The Mayor went brick-red.

“The seventh victim, Doctor — your wife’s niece-was 25 years old. If any prediction is possible in this case, it’s that Victim Number 8 will be under 25. Unless you’re successful, or we are, we may soon be investigating the strangulation of children.” Ellery set his glass down. “Would you say good night to Mrs. Cazalis for me?”