Cat of Many Tails, page 7
They waited.
“She stopped to read the note,” said the Inspector.
“And there she goes.” Ellery strolled over to the armchair. “Why, Dad,” he said, “in Celeste’s note I instructed her to find out all she can about Jimmy McKell. In Jimmy’s note I instructed him to find out all he can about Celeste Phillips.”
Ellery relit his pipe, puffing placidly.
“You conniver,” breathed his father. “The one thing I didn’t think of, and the only thing that makes sense.”
“If Heaven drops a date, the wise man opens his mouth. Chinese proverb.”
The Inspector launched himself from the jamb, steaming around the room like Scuffy the Tugboat.
“Beautiful,” he chortled. “They’ll have to head for each other like two—” He stopped.
“Cats?” Ellery took the pipe from his mouth. “That’s just it, Dad. I don’t know. This could be brutal. But we can’t take chances. We simply mustn’t.”
“Oh, it’s ridiculous,” snapped the old man. “A couple of romantic kids.”
“I thought I detected the inspectorial nose twitch once or twice during Celeste’s true confession.”
“Well, in this business you suspect everybody at least once. But when you stop to think about it, you—”
“You what? We don’t know a thing about the Cat. The Cat may be male, female, 16, 60, white, black, brown, or purple.”
“I thought you told me a few days ago that you’d spotted something. What was it, a mirage?”
“Irony really isn’t your long suit, Dad. I didn’t mean something about the Cat himself.”
The Inspector shrugged. He started for the door. “I meant something about the Cat’s operations.” The old man pulled up, turned around. “What did you say?”
“The six murders have certain elements in common.”
“Elements in common?” Ellery nodded.
“How many?” The Inspector sounded choked.
“At least three. I can think of a fourth, too.”
His father ran back. “What, son? What are they?”
But Ellery did not answer.
After a moment the Inspector hitched his trousers up and, very pale, marched out of the room.
“Dad?”
“What?” His angry voice shot in from the foyer. “I need more time.”
“For what? So he can wring a few more necks?”
“That was below the belt. You ought to know these things can’t be rushed sometimes.”
Ellery sprang to his feet. And he was pale, too. “Dad, they mean something. They must! But what?”
Chapter 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 neck 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 did 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’A E 84.
There was also a Richardson Zachary 12’A 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 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 dry-goods 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 mid-dleaged 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 Delia’s in a panic, overwhelmed by feelings of guilt. Clinically speaking, mothers like Delia 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 Delia’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 mensis,” 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 Delia 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.-Lo, 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 Delia and Zach won’t be rolling in till 3 or 4 in the morning.” At a few minutes past midnight the doctor had 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.
