Queen's Ransom, page 80
Celeste came in and sat down without waiting for anything she said, “I couldn’t help it. When she ran out of onionskin second sheets and said she was walking over to Third Avenue for some, I almost died. I knew he wouldn’t dare try anything if somebody was with her. Now give me ten demerits.”
Jimmy glared. “Are you out of your everloving mind?”
“Did he follow us?” She was bloodless tonight, very nervous. Ellery idly noticed her hands. They were cracked and red; her nails were chewed-looking. There was something else about her, too, but it insisted on being elusive.
What was it?
“He followed you,” said the Inspector. Then he said, “Miss Phillips, nothing would have happened to her.” He said, “Miss Phillips, this case has cost the City of New York I don’t know how many tens of thousands of dollars and months of work. Today by acting like an irresponsible moron you undid every last bit of it. We may never get as good a chance again. It could mean not getting him at all. Today he was desperate. If she’d been alone, he’d have jumped. I can’t tell you how put out I am with you. In fact, Miss Phillips, I’m not irreverent when I say I wish to God Almighty I’d never seen or heard of you.”
Jimmy started to get up.
Celeste pulled him down, rested her cheeks on his shoulder. “Inspector, I just couldn’t find the strength to let her walk out into that street alone. What do I do now?”
The old man raised his glass of beer with shaking hands and drained it.
“Celeste.” What was it?
“Yes, Mr. Queen.” Jimmy’s clutch tightened and she smiled up at him.
“You’re not to do that again.”
“I can’t promise that, Mr. Queen.”
“You did promise it.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“We can’t pull you out now. We can’t disturb the status quo. He may try another trick tomorrow.”
“I wouldn’t leave. I couldn’t.”
“Won’t you promise not to interfere?”
Jimmy touched her face.
“This may all be over by tomorrow night. He hasn’t the remotest chance of hurting her. She’s covered, so is he. Let him get that cord out, make one move toward her, and he’ll be jumped by four armed men.
Did Marilyn finish the play she’s typing?”
“No, she was too exhausted tonight. She has a few more hours’ work on it tomorrow. She says she’s going to sleep late, so that means she won’t have it done till late afternoon.”
“She’s to deliver it immediately?”
“The writer is waiting for it. It’s overdue now.”
“Where does he live?”
“The Village.”
“Weather forecast for tomorrow is more rain. It will be dark or almost dark when she leaves the house. He’ll make his pitch either on East 29th Street or in the Village. One day more, Celeste, and we can bury this with the rest of our bad dreams. Won’t you let her go alone?”
“I’ll try.”
What was it?
Inspector Queen snarled, “Another beer!”
“You’re making this awfully tough, Celeste. Did you leave Marilyn all right?”
“She’s gone to bed. They all have. Mr. and Mrs. Soames and Billie and Eleanor are going to church early tomorrow.”
“Good night.” Ellery’s chin angular. “I’d hate to think you let us down.”
Jimmy said, “Cheese it. The aborigine.”
The waiter slapped a beer down before the Inspector. He lisped, “What’s for the lady?”
“Nothing,” said Jimmy. “Remove yourself.”
“Listen, pally, this is a going concern. She drinks, or you do your smooching someplace else.”
Jimmy slowly uncoiled. “Listen yourself, no-brow—”
The Inspector barked, “On your way.”
The waiter looked surprised and backed off.
“Go on back, baby,” crooned Jimmy. “I would have a word or two with our associates here.”
“Jimmy, kiss me?”
“Here?”
“I don’t care.”
He kissed her. The waiter glowered rom afar.
Celeste ran.
The fog swallowed her.
Jimmy got up to lean over the Queens with a bitter expression. He opened his mouth.
But Ellery said, “Isn’t that Young?” He was squinting through the murk.
They jerked about like rabbits.
The detective was in the open doorway. His glance darted along the bar, from booth to booth. There were deep yellowish lines around his mouth.
Ellery laid a bill on their table.
They got up.
Young spotted them. He was breathing through his mouth.
“Now listen, Inspector, listen.” There was sweat on his upper lip. “It’s this goddam fog, you can’t see your hand in front of your face in this goddam fog. Goldberg and I were right on his tail when all of a sudden he doubled back on us. Back east. Back here. Like he got the urge again and decided to make a night of it. He looked crazy-mad. I don’t know if he saw us or not. I don’t think so.” Young inhaled. “We lost him in the fog. Goldie’s out there roaming around, looking for him. I’ve been looking for you.”
“He headed back here and you lost him.”
Inspector Queen’s cheeks were damp and hardening plaster.
Now I remember.
“That checked coat,” said Ellery mechanically.
“What?” said his father.
“She was so upset tonight she put it on instead of her own. He’s loose and Celeste is out there in Marilyn’s coat.”
They tumbled after Jimmy McKell into the fog.
11
THEY HEARD CELESTE’S SHRIEK as they sprinted along First Avenue between 30th and 29th Streets.
A man was running toward them from the 29th Street corner waving them back wildly.
“Goldberg…”
Not on 29th Street, then. It was here, along First Avenue.
The scream gurgled. It gurgled again, like a song.
“That alley!” yelled Ellery.
It was a narrow opening between the 29th Street corner building and a block of stores. The alley was nearer to Goldberg but Jimmy McKell’s praying mantis legs got him there first.
He vanished.
A radio-patrol car tore up, its headlights splashing against the fog. Inspector Queen shouted something and the car backed and lurched to train its brights and side light on the alley entrance.
As they dashed in, Johnson and Piggot skidded around the corner with drawn guns.
Sirens began sawing away on 29th, 30th, Second Avenue.
An ambulance shot diagonally across First Avenue from Bellevue.
In the boiling fog the girl and the two men were struggling casually. Staggered: Celeste, Cazalis, Jimmy; caught in the molecular path of a slow motion projection. Celeste faced them, arched; a bow in the arms of a bowman. The fingers of both hands were at her throat defending it; they had deliberately trapped themselves between her neck and the pinkish cord encircling it. Blood sparkled on her knuckles. Behind Celeste, gripping the ends of the noose, swayed Cazalis, bare head wrenched back by Jimmy McKell’s stranglehold; the big man’s tongue was between his teeth, eyes open to the sky in a calm expressionless glare. Jimmy’s free hand was trying to claw Cazalis’s clutch loose from the cord. Jimmy’s lips were drawn back; he looked as if he were laughing.
Ellery reached them a half-step before the others.
He smashed Cazalis directly behind the left ear with his fist, inserted his arm between Jimmy and Cazalis and smacked Jimmy’s chin with the heel of his hand.
“Let go, Jimmy, let go.”
Cazalis slid to the wet concrete, his eyes still open in that curious glare. Goldberg, Young, Johnson, Piggott, one of the patrolmen, fell on him. Young kneed him; he doubled under them, screeching like a woman.
“That wasn’t necessary,” said Ellery. He kept nursing his right hand.
“I’ve got a trick knee,” said Young apologetically. “In a case like this it goes pop! like that.”
Inspector Queen said, “Open his fist. As if he were your mother. I want that cord smoking hot.”
An intern in an overcoat was kneeling by Celeste. Her hair glittered in a puddle. Jimmy cried out, lunging. Ellery caught him by the collar with his other hand.
“But she’s dead!”
“Fainted, Jimmy.”
Inspector Queen was scrutinizing the pink cord with love. It was made of thick, tough silk. Tussah.
He said, “How’s the girl, Doctor, hm?” as he eyed the noose dangling from his upheld hand.
“Neck’s lacerated some, mostly at the sides and back,” replied the ambulance doctor. “Her hands got the worst pressure. Smart little gal.”
“She looks dead, I tell you.”
“Shock. Pulse and respiration good. She’ll live to tell this to her grandchildren till it’s coming out of their ears.” Celeste moaned. “She’s on her way out of it now.”
Jimmy sat down in the wet of the alley.
The Inspector was snaking the silk cord carefully into an envelope. Ellery heard him humming “My Wild Irish Rose.”
They had Cazalis’s hands manacled behind his back. He was lying on his soaked right side with his knees drawn up, staring through Young’s big legs at an overturned trash can a few feet away. His face was dirty and gray, his eyes seemed all whites.
The Cat.
He lay in a cage whose bars were the legs of men, breathing ponderously.
The Cat.
They were taking it easy, waiting for the intern to get finished with Celeste Phillips; joking and laughing. Johnson, who disliked Goldberg, offered Goldberg a cigaret; Goldberg had lost his pack somewhere. Goldberg accepted it companionably and struck a match for Johnson, too, who said, “Thanks, Goldie.” Piggott was telling about the time—it was during a train wreck—when he had been cuffed to a homicidal maniac for fourteen solid hours: “I was so jittery I smacked him on the jaw every ten minutes to keep him quiet.” They guffawed.
Young was complaining to the patrolman, “Hell, I was on the Harlem run for six years. Up there you use your knee first and ask questions afterward. Shiv artists. The whole bastardly lot of ’em.”
“I don’t know,” said the patrolman doubtfully. “I’ve known some that were white men. You take Zilgitt.”
“What difference does it make?” Young glanced down at their prisoner. “He’s squirrel bait, anyway. Where there’s no sense there’s no feeling.”
The man lying at their feet had his mouth going a little, as if he was chewing on something.
“Hey,” said Goldberg. “What’s he doing that for?”
“Doing what?” Inspector Queen shouldered in, alarmed.
“Look at his mouth, Inspector!”
The Inspector dropped to the concrete and grasped Cazalis’s jaw.
“Watch it, Inspector,” someone laughed. “They bite.”
The mouth opened docilely. Young flashed a light into it over Inspector Queen’s shoulder.
“Nothing,” said the Inspector. “He was chewing on his tongue.”
Young said, “Maybe the Cat’s got it,” and most of them laughed again.
“Hurry it up, Doctor, will you?” said the Inspector.
“In a minute.” The intern was wrapping Celeste in a blanket; her head kept lolling.
Jimmy was trying to fend off the other ambulance man. “Scatter, scatter,” he said. “Can’t you see McKell is in conference?”
“McKell, you’ve got blood all over your mouth and chin.”
“I have?” Jimmy felt his chin looked at his fingers with surprise.
“Mister, you bit halfway through your lower lip.”
“Come onnnnn, Celeste,” crooned Jimmy. Then he yelped. The ambulance man kept working on his mouth.
It had turned colder suddenly, but no one seemed to notice. The fog was thinning rapidly. There was a star or two.
Ellery was sitting on the trash can. “My Wild Irish Rose” was going patiently in his head, like a hurdy-gurdy. Several times he tried to turn it off but it kept going.
There was another star.
The back windows of the surrounding buildings were all bright and open; it was very cheerful. Crammed with heads and shoulders. Box seats. Arena, that was it. The pit. It. They couldn’t possibly see It, but they could hope, couldn’t they? In New York, hope dwells in every eye. A dwindling old building. A sidewalk excavation. An open manhole. A traffic accident. What was it? What’s happened? Who got hit? Is it gangsters? What are they doing down there?
It didn’t matter.
The Cats in his Hell, all’s right with the world.
New York papers please copy.
“Jimmy, come here.”
“Not now.”
“Extra,” called Ellery, with significance. “Don’t you want a bonus?”
Jimmy laughed. “Didn’t I tell you? They fired me last week.”
“Get to a phone. They’ll make you editor.”
“The hell with them.”
“It’s worth a million to them.”
“I’ve got a million.”
Ellery rocked on the trash can. The screwball was really a card. Swell kid, Jimmy. Ellery laughed again, wondering why his hand felt so queer.
The third floor windows at the rear of 486 East 29th were all filled, too.
They don’t know. The name of Soames goes down in history and they’re sitting up there wondering whose name they’ll read in the papers.
“Here she is,” announced the intern. “Greetings, Miss, and may I be the first to congratulate you?”
Her bandaged hands went to her throat.
Jimmy mumbled to the other one, “Will you get the devil off my lip? Baby, it’s me. It’s all over. Fini. Jimmy, baby. Remember me?”
“Jimmy.”
“She recognizes me! All over, baby.”
“That horrible…”
“It’s all over.”
My Wiiiiiild Irish Rooooose…
“I was hurrying along First Avenue.”
“Practically a grandmother. This iodine dispenser said so.”
“He pulled me in as I passed. I saw his face and then it was dark. My neck.”
“Save it, save your strength for a little later, Miss Phillips,” said the Inspector genially.
“All over, baby.”
“The Cat. Where is he? Jimmy, where is he?”
“Now stop shaking. Lying right over there. Just an alley cat. See? Look. Don’t be afraid.”
Celeste began to cry.
“It’s all over, baby.” Jimmy had his arms around her and they rocked together in a little puddle.
Wonder where they think Celeste is. Down here “helping out,” probably. Clara Barton stuff… And is it not a battlefield? The Battle of First Avenue. After sending McKell’s Marauders out on cavalry reconnaissance, General Queen feinted with Phillips’s Corps and engaged the enemy with his Centre Str…. Ellery thought he spied the dark head of Marilyn Soames among the other heads, but then he untwisted his neck and rubbed the back of it. What was in that beer?
“Okay, Doc, okay,” the Inspector was saying. “Over here now.”
The intern stooped over Cazalis, looked up. “Who did you say this is?” he asked sharply.
“He got a hard one in the groin. I don’t want to move him till you say it’s all right.”
“This man is Dr. Edward Cazalis, the psychiatrist!”
Everybody laughed.
“Thanks, Doc,” said Detective Young, winking at the others. “We’re beholden to you.”
They laughed again.
The intern flushed. After a while he got to his feet. “Hold him up and he’ll make it. Nothing serious.”
“Upsadaisy!”
“Say, I’ll bet he was pulling a fakeroo all the time.”
“Young, you better practice up that knee action.”
“Watch him, watch him.”
He was making a strong effort to move his legs, mincing along half on his toes like a student ballet dancer, his knees not quite supporting him.
“Don’t look,” Jimmy said. “It’s not the least bit important.”
“It is. I want to. I promised my—” But then Celeste shuddered and looked away.
“Keep that street out there cleared.” The Inspector looked around. “Hold it.” The procession stopped and Cazalis seemed grateful. “Where’s Ellery?”
“Over there, Inspector.”
“Hey.”
“What’s the matter with him?”
My Wiiiiild Ir…
The trash can clattered and rolled a few feet.
“He’s hurt.”
“Doctor!”
The intern said, “He passed out. His hand is fractured. Easy…”
Easy. Easy does it, a mere five months’ worth of sniff and dig and hunt and plot—twenty-one weeks of it; to be exact, twenty-one weeks and one day, one hundred and forty-eight days from a soft rap on the door of an East 19th Street apartment to a hard smash to a man’s head in a First Avenue alley; from Abernethy, Archibald Dudley to Phillips, Celeste, alias Sue Martin, Girl Spy; from Friday, June 3, to Saturday, October 29; point four-o-four per cent of a single year in the life of the City of New York, during which period one of the City’s numerous hatchetmen cut down the population of the Borough of Manhattan by nine lives although, to be sure, there was that little matter of the Metropol Hall panic and the rioting that followed; in the sum, however, statistical chicken feed lost in Bunyan’s barnyard, and what was all the excitement about?
Easy does it.
Easy does it, for the Cat sat in a hard chair under photographic light and he was not the tails-lashing chimera of the broken metropolitan dream but a tumbledown old man with shaking hands and an anxious look, as if he wanted to please but not quite sure what was required of him. They had found a second salmon-pink cord of tussah silk on his person and at the rear of one of the locked filing cabinets in his Park Avenue office a cache of two dozen others of which more than half were dyed the remembered blue; he had instructed them where to look and he had picked out the right key for them from the assortment in his key case. He said he had had the cords for many years; since late in 1930, when he was on a tour around the world after retiring from his obstetrical practice. In India a native had sold him the cords, representing them to be old strangling cords of thuggee origin. Later, before putting them away, he had dyed them blue and pink. Why had he saved them all these years? He looked bewildered. No, his wife had never known about them; he had been alone when he purchased them in the bazaar and he had kept them hidden afterward… His head slanted readily to their questions and he answered in a courteous way, although there were stretches when he became uncommunicative or slightly erratic. But the rambling episodes were few; for the most part he caught the pertinent past in brilliant focus, sounding quite like the Dr. Cazalis they had known.
