Queen's Ransom, page 68
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.
EL—Been phoning since 5. Dashed home to leave this note. Meet me at Cazalis’s the minute you get in. Big powwow set for 7:30.
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?”
