Queen's Ransom, page 81
His eyes, however, remained unchanged, staring, lenslike.
Ellery, who had come there directly from Bellevue Hospital with Celeste Phillips and Jimmy McKell, sat to one side, his right hand in a splint, listening and saying nothing. He had not yet run down; he still had a feeling of unreality. The Police Commissioner and the District Attorney were also present; and at a little past 4:30 A.M. the Mayor hurried in, paler than the prisoner.
But the grimy old man in the chair seemed not to see any of them. It was a deliberate avoidance, they all felt, dictated by a kind of tact. They knew how plausible such madmen could be.
In the main, his account of the nine murders was remarkable for its detail. Barring his few lapses from clarity, which might well have resulted from pain, confusion, emotional and physical exhaustion—had they not known what he really was—his confession was excellent.
His least satisfactory reply came in response to Ellery’s only contribution to the night’s inquisition.
When the prisoner had nearly concluded, Ellery leaned forward and asked: “Dr. Cazalis, you’ve admitted that you hadn’t seen any of these people since their infancy. As individuals, therefore, they couldn’t possibly have meant anything to you. Yet obviously you had something against them. What was it? Why did you feel you had to kill them?”
Because the conduct of the psychotic appears unmotivated only when judged in the perspective of reality—that is, by more or less healthy minds viewing the world as it is…
Said Dr. Cazalis.
The prisoner twisted in his chair and looked directly at the source of Ellery’s voice, although because of the lights beating on his bruised face it was plain that he could not see beyond them.
“Is that Mr. Queen?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Mr. Queen,” said the prisoner in a friendly, almost indulgent tone, “I doubt that you’re scientifically equipped to understand.”
Sunday’s morning was full-grown when they got away from the reporters. Jimmy McKell sprawled in a corner of the taxi with Celeste in his arms and in the other corner Ellery pampered his immobilized hand, looking out the window on his side not for reasons of delicacy but because he wanted to see through it.
The City looked different this morning.
Felt, smelled, sounded different.
New.
The air had a tune in it. Maybe it was the church-bells. Churches were bellowing their wares downtown and up, East Side to west. Adeste fideles! Come and get it!
In the residential sections delicatessens, bakeries, newsstands, drugstores were busy opening.
An El train went bucketing by somewhere.
A newsboy, bluepawed.
Occasionally an early riser appeared, rubbing his hands together, walking smartly.
At taxi stands cabs stood parked. Bootleg radios going. Drivers intent.
People began collecting around them.
New York was stretching.
Waking up.
12
NEW YORK AWOKE and for a week or two the ugly vision tarried. Had radio’s celebrated planetary invasion of Earth been real, people would have stood in long lines afterward to view the Martian remains and wonder at their gullibility. Now that the monster was localized in a cage, where it could be seen, heard, pinched, reported, read about, even pitied, New York queued up. The clarity of hindsight engaged the facts of postmortem and out of it came citywide conversation pieces in shame, a safe and even enjoyable exercise for all. The Cat was merely a demented old man; and what was one lunatic against a city? File and forget; Thanksgiving was coming.
New York laughed.
Still, like his British cousin from Cheshire, the Cat lingered in his grin after the rest of him had vanished. It was not the grin of the old man in the cell; that old man did not grin. It was the grin of the dream monster. And there were the children, with shorter memories but fresher senses. Parents had still to contend with nightmares. Not excluding their own.
Then, on the morning after Armistice Day, the body of a young girl later identified as Reva Xavinzky, of Flushing, was found in various places about Jamaica Bay. She had been ravished, mutilated, dismembered, and decapitated. The familiar horrors of this case, its recognizably atrocious details, instantly diverted public attention; and by the time the murderer, an ex-Army deserter with a typical history of the sexual psychopath, was caught, the diversion—at least insofar as adults were concerned—was complete. Thereafter the word “cat” raised no grislier image in the mind’s eye of the average New Yorker than that of a small domestic animal characterized by cleanliness, independence, and a useful appetite for mice. (That the case of Reva Xavinzky, performed a like service for younger New York may be questioned; but most parents seemed to feel that with Thanksgiving and Christmas hovering, the Cat would be supplanted in their children’s dreams by turkey and Santa Claus. And perhaps they were right.)
There was a minority with special interests, however, who hung on. For some—certain City officials, reporters, psychiatrists, the families of the Cat’s victims—this was a matter of duty, or specific assignment, or professional or personal implication. For others—the sociologists, the psychologists, the philosophers—the capture of the nine-times murderer signalized the opportunity to launch a socio-scientific investigation of the City’s behavior since early June. The second groups were wholly unconcerned with Edward Cazalis; the first were concerned with no one else.
The prisoner had retreated to a sullen phase. He refused to talk, he refused to exercise, for a time he refused to eat; he appeared to exist only for the visits of his wife, for whom he called constantly. Mrs. Cazalis, accompanied by her sister and brother-in-law, had flown back from Florida on October 30. She had refused to believe the reports of her husband’s arrest as the Cat, protesting to reporters in Miami and New York that “there’s some mistake. It can’t be. My husband is innocent.” But that was before her first meeting with him. She emerged from it deathly pale, shaking her head to the press, going directly to the home of her sister. She was there for four hours; then she returned to her own apartment.
It was noted in those first excited days after the monster’s capture that it was his mate who took the full impact of the City’s animus. She was pointed out, jeered at, followed. Her sister and brother-in-law vanished; no one could or would say where they had gone. Her maid deserted her and she was unable to engage another. She was asked to vacate her apartment by a management that made it frantically clear they would use every means within their power to evict her if she resisted. She did not resist; she placed her household furnishings in storage and moved to a small downtown hotel; and when the hotel management discovered who she was the next morning, she was asked to leave. This time she found quarters in a lugubrious rooming house on Horatio Street in the Village; and it was here that her eldest brother, Roger Braham Merigrew of Bangor, Maine, located her.
Merigrew’s visit to his sister did not outlast the night. He had come accompanied by a shadlike man carrying a briefcase; when the two emerged from the Horatio Street building at 3:45 in the morning and found the reporters waiting, it was Merigrew’s companion who covered his factor’s escape and gave the statement which appeared in the newspapers later that day. “As Mr. Merigrew’s attorney I am authorized to state the following: Mr. Merigrew has attempted for several days to persuade his sister, Mrs. Cazalis, to rejoin her kin in Maine. Mrs. Cazalis refused. So Mr. Merigrew flew down to renew his appeal in person. Mrs. Cazalis still refuses. There is nothing further Mr. Merigrew can do, therefore he is returning home. That’s all there is to this.” Asked by reporters why Mr. Merigrew did not remain by his sister’s side in New York, the Maine attorney snapped, “You’ll have to ask Mr. Merigrew that.” Later, a Bangor paper managed to get a few words from Merigrew. He said, “My sister’s husband is insane. There’s no cause to stand by a murdering lunatic. It’s not fair to us, the publicity and so on. Any further statement will have to come from my sister.” The Merigrews owned large conservative business interests throughout New England.
So Mrs. Cazalis faced her ordeal alone, living in a squalid Village room, dogged by reporters, visiting her husband, and growing daily wilder-eyed and more silent.
She engaged the famous attorney, Darrell Irons, to defend her husband. Irons was uncommunicative, but it was rumored that he was having his hands full. Cazalis, it was said, “refused” to be defended and would not co-operate with the psychiatrists Irons sent endlessly to his cell. Stories began to circulate of maniacal rages, attempted physical violence, incoherent ravings on the part of the prisoner; those who knew Darrell Irons stated that he had inspired them and that most likely, therefore, they were not true. It was clear what Irons’s defense would be, for the District Attorney seemed determined to prosecute Cazalis as a man who knew the nature and quality of his acts, who had demonstrated in his daily life even during the period of his crimes his capacity to act rationally and who therefore, under legal definition, must be considered “sane,” no matter what he may have been under the medical definition. The District Attorney set considerable store, it was said, by the prisoner’s conversations with the Mayor’s Special Investigator and Inspector Richard Queen of Police Headquarters on the night of the Lenore Richardson investigation, when he had outlined his “theory” of the Cat case as pointing to a psychotic pure and simple. This had been the calculated act of a calculating murderer, the D.A. was said to hold, purposely turning the investigation into a channel of “gibbering idiocy” the more effectually to divert attention from the responsible mentality behind the stranglings.
A dramatic trial was forecast.
Ellery’s interest in the case flagged early. He had lived with it far too long at too steep a pitch to experience anything but exhaustion after the events of the night of October 29-30. He found himself trying not merely to forget the past but to dodge the present. The present, at least, would not to be evaded; it insisted on applying pomp to circumstance. There were Athenian honors, press and radio-television interviews, a hundred invitations to address civic groups and write articles and investigate unsolved crimes. He managed to back away from most of these with approximate grace. The few he could not avoid left him irritable and profane. “What’s the matter with you?” demanded his father. “Let’s say,” snapped Ellery, “that success has gone to my head.” The Inspector puckered; he was no stranger to migraine, either. “Well,” he said cheerfully, “at least this time it’s not caused by failure.”
Ellery continued to fling himself from chair to chair.
One day he decided he had located the infection. It was the boil of pressure. But not of the past or the present; of the future. He was not finished. On the morning of January 2, in one of the larger courtrooms under the gray dome of the Supreme Court building in Foley Square, a Mr. Justice-Somebody would make his blackrobed entrance from chambers and one Edward Cazalis, alias the Cat, would go on trial charged with murder. And in this trial one Ellery Queen, Special Investigator to the Mayor, would be a major witness for the people. There would be no release for him until that ordeal was passed. Then he could go about his business purged of the whole corrupting mess.
Why the trial should cause him such twinges Ellery did not attempt to diagnose. Having discovered—as he thought—the source of his malady, he adjusted his psychic screws to the inevitable and turned to other matters. By this time Reva Xavinzky had been collated and the spotlight probed elsewhere. He was able almost to relax. Even to think about getting back to writing. The novel he had neglected since August 25 lay in its lonely grave. He exhumed it and was surprised to find it as alien as any tax roll papyrus dug out of the Nile delta after three thousand years. Once, long ago, he had labored greatly on this, and now it had the historic smell of shards. Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Despairing, Ellery dropped the primitive effort of his pre-Cat days into the fire.
And sat him down to compose a newer wonder.
But before he could settle his feet on the bottom drawer, there was an agreeable interruption.
Jimmy McKell and Celeste Phillips were being wed and it seemed that Mr. Queen, in his single person, was to constitute the wedding party.
“Exclusive,” grinned Jimmy, “by McKell.”
“Jimmy means,” signed Celeste, “that his father hit the roof and won’t come.”
“He’s biting the Chippendale,” said Jimmy, “because his hitherto invincible weapon—disownery? disownment?—has turned to womanish water in his hand, now that I’m buckled into Grandfather’s millions. And Mother’d no sooner got over sopping up the tears than she started planning a twenty-thousand guest wedding. So I said the hell with it—”
“And we got our license, we’ve taken our Wassermanns—”
“Successfully,” added Jimmy, “so would you hand my bride over to me in City Hall at 10:30 tomorrow morning, Mr. Q?”
They were married between the Arthur Jackson Beals of Harlem and the Gary G. Cohens-to-be of Brownsville, Brooklyn; the City Clerk did them distinguished honor by going no more than half so rapidly as usual; Mr. Queen bussed the bride with a fervent “At last!”; and afterward there were only eighteen reporters and cameramen waiting for them in the hall. Mrs. James Guymer McKell exclaimed that she couldn’t imagine how in the world they had all known, because she and Jimmy hadn’t breathed a word to anyone but Ellery… and her groom growled an invitation to his ex-fellow-journalists to hoist a few on him, whereupon the augmented party set out for La Guardia Airport and the wedding luncheon was imbibed in a cocktail lounge, with Parlay Phil Gonachy of the Extra crying the square dance which somehow followed. At the climax of the thunderous quadrille the Airport police appeared, causing certain strict constitutionalists among the working guests to defend with camera, bottle, and bar stool the sacred freedom of the press and enabling the happy couple to slip away with their sponsor.
“Whither do you fly with your unravished bride?” inquired Mr. Queen in a slightly wobbly tone. “Or is said question none of my olfactory business?”
“It is entirely comme il faut,” replied Mr. McKell with the grandeur of one who has also given generous lip service to the sacraments of Reims and Epernay, “since we fly no-whither,” and he steered his bride gallantly exitward.
“Then why La Guardia?”
“A ruse to mislead those roistering anteaters. Equerry!”
“We’re spending our honeymoon at the Half-Moon Hotel,” confided the bride with a blush as a cab rushed up. “You’re positively the only one who knows that.”
“Mrs. McKell, I shall guard your secret with my honor.”
“Mrs. McKell,” murmured Mrs. McKell.
“All my life,” said her husband in a whisper that shot heads around twenty feet away, “I have yearned for a winter’s honeymoon among the frolicking Polar Bears of Coney Island.” And Mr. McKell yelled to the apprehensive hack, “Okay, White Fang. Mush!”
Ellery observed their exhaust fondly as they rode off into the smog.
After that he found it joy to settle down to work. Ideas for a new mystery novel flowed like the wedding party’s champagne; the only problem was to keep a sober judgment.
One morning Ellery looked around to find Father Christmas breathing down his neck. And he saw with some astonishment that New York’s Yule was to be white; overnight, 87th Street sparkled. A Samoyed rolling in the snow across the street made him think of the arctic huskies; and thus he was reminded of the James McKells and their Coney Island honeymoon, among the curious tribe of New Yorkers who called themselves the Polar Bears. Ellery grinned, wondering why he had not heard from Jimmy and Celeste. Then it occurred to him that he had, and he began looking through his deserted mail, an accumulation of several weeks.
He found Jimmy’s note in the middle of the heap.
We like it Ellery. We like it.
If you have a mind to crack a friendly jeroboam for auld lang syne, the McKells are receiving in the back room of Kelly’s Bar on East 39th at 2 P.M. tomorrow for all of the tribe of Jurgen. We still haven’t found an apartment and are bedding down with various disreputable characters. I won’t take my wife to a hotel.
JAMES
P.S. If you don’t show, we’ll see you at the Assizes.
P.P.S. Mrs. McK. sends love. J.
The postmark was ten days old.
The McKells and, Christmas… This called for heroism.
A half hour later Ellery was up to his armpits in lists, and a half hour after that he was sallying forth in galoshes.
Fifth Avenue was already a speckled swamp. The plows were still working in the side streets but along the Avenue they had toiled all night like beetles rolling dung and the brown-spattered snowplows challenged the agility of jaywalkers and squeezed motor traffic into an impossible bottleneck.
A white Christmas, everybody was saying, shuffling through the slush, sneezing and coughing.
At Rockefeller Center Noel was being caroled and in the Plaza, dwarfed by a hundred-foot tree raped from some Long Island estate, the skaters were whizzing along to a determined version of “Jingle Bells.”
Santas in wrinkled red suits clanged at almost every corner, shivering. Shop windows were faery glimpses into the magic wood of advertising. And everywhere people slipped and sloshed, and Ellery slipped and sloshed with them, wearing the glazed frown by which you may know all New Yorkers, in the last week before Christmas.
