Queen's Ransom, page 59
“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.
