Ellery Queen - Cat of Many Tails

The psychiatrist threw up his hands. “What was that line from a movie I once saw? ‘Bilked by my own chicanery!’ All right, Inspector, I’m hooked. What’s the procedure?”

“Where are you going to be later today?”

“Depends on how Della and Zach behave themselves. Either here or at home, Inspector. This morning I’m going to try to get a few hours’ sleep.”

“Try?” Ellery stretched, rising. “In my case it won’t be the least problem.”

“Sleeping is always a problem with me. I’m a chronic insomniac — a symptom which is generally part of the clinical picture,” said the psychiatrist with a smile, “of dementia, general paresis, and so on, but don’t tell my patients. I keep well supplied with sleeping pills.”

“I’ll phone you this afternoon, Dr. Cazalis.”

Cazalis nodded to the Inspector and strolled out.

The Queens were silent. The men working on the terrace were beginning to drift away. Sergeant Velie was crossing the terrace in the sun.

“What do you think?” asked the Inspector suddenly.

“Think? About what, Dad?”

“Cazalis.”

“Oh. — Very solid citizen.”

“Yes, isn’t he.”

“Nothing doing,” said Sergeant Velie. “No sign of a damn thing, Inspector. He got in by that penthouse elevator, all right.”

“The only thing is,” mumbled the Inspector, “I wish he’d stop those figure exercise of his. Makes me nervous. — Oh, Velie. Knock off and get some shuteye.”

“What about those newspaper guys?”

“They’ve probably ganged up on Dr. Cazalis. Run interference for him and tell them I’ll be right there. With my own pet line of double talk.”

The sergeant nodded and clumped off, yawning.

“How about you, Dad?”

“I’ll have to go downtown first. You going home now?”

“If I can get away in one piece.”

“Wait in the hall closet. I’ll decoy ’em into the living room here and then you can make the break.”

They parted rather awkwardly.

When Ellery woke up he found his father perched on the edge of the bed, looking at him.

“Dad. What time is it?”

“Past 5.”

Ellery stretched. “Just pull in?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Anything new in crime?”

“P.m. shows nothing so far. The cord’s a washout. It’s the other six continued.”

“How’s the atmosphere? Safe?”

“I wouldn’t say so.” Inspector Queen hugged himself as if he were cold. “They’re really laying into this one. Every line into Headquarters and City Hall jammed. The papers have taken the gloves off and they’re yelping for blood. Whatever good the announcement of your appointment did has gone up the flue with the murder of the Richardson girl. When I walked into the Mayor’s office with the Commissioner this morning to confer on the Cazalis thing His Honor practically kissed me. Phoned Cazalis then and there. First thing he said over the phone was, ‘Dr. Cazalis, when can you hold a press conference?’”

“Cazalis going to do it?”

“He’s doing it right this minute. And going on the air tonight.”

“I must be a great disappointment to His Honor.” Ellery laughed. “Now hit the sack or you’ll be a candidate for a medical conference yourself.”

The Inspector failed to move.

“There’s something else?”

“Ellery.” The old man pulled up his left leg and began slowly to untie his shoelace. “There’s been some nasty talk downtown. I wouldn’t ask you this except that if I’m to keep taking it on the chin I’ve got to know what round it is.”

“Ask me what?”

“I want you to tell me what you’ve spotted.” He began on the other shoe. “For my own information, you understand,” he explained to the shoe. “Or let me put it another way. If I’m to keep singeing my pants I want to know what the hell I’m sitting on.”

It was a kind of declaration of independence, conceived in grievance and delivered for just cause.

Ellery looked unhappy.

He reached for a cigaret and an ashtray and lay back with the tray balanced on his chest.

“All right,” he said. “From your standpoint I’m a disloyal dispenser of nothing and from your standpoint I suppose I am. Now let’s see whether what I’ve been holding out on you could prove of the slightest utility to you, me, the Mayor, the Commissioner, or the shade of Poe.

“One: Archibald Dudley Abernethy was 44 years old. Violette Smith was 42 years old. Rian O’Reilly was 40 years old. Monica McKell was 37 years old. Simone Phillips was 35 years old. Beatrice Willikins was 32 years old. Lenore Richardson was 25 years old. 44, 42, 40, 37, 35, 32, 25.”

The Inspector was staring.

“Each victim’s been younger than the victim preceding. That’s why I was so positive Dr. Cazalis couldn’t have been Number 7; he’s older than any of them. To have been seventh on the list he’d have to have been under 32, the sixth victim’s age... that is, if there was a descending-age pattern. And it turned out that Number 7, the Richardson girl, was 25, and I was right. There is a descending-age pattern. Mathematically irregular differences, but they’re always younger, younger.”

The old man gripped his right shoe. “We didn’t see that. Nobody saw it.”

“Well, it’s one of those exasperating little fragments of sense in a jumble. Like the hidden-face puzzles. You look and look, and suddenly there it is. But what does it mean? It’s sense, all right, but what sense? It springs from a cause, but what cause? It can’t conceivably be the result of coincidence; not seven! And yet the longer you examine it, the less it seems to signify. Can you think of a single satisfactory reason why anyone should go to the trouble of killing successively younger people — who haven’t the faintest connection with one another? I can’t.”

“I’s a poser, all right,” his father muttered.

“It’s true I might announce tonight that no New Yorker 25 years old or older had anything to worry about because the Cat’s going down the actuarial tables and he’s passed Age 25...”

“Very funny,” said the Inspector feebly. “It sounds like — like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan. They’d all think you were crazy and if they thought you were sane it would only pack all the anxiety down into the — the lower brackets.”

“Something like that,” nodded Ellery. “So I kept it to myself.

“Two.” He crushed the cigaret out and cradled his head, staring at the ceiling. “Of the seven victims, two have been male, five female. Until this last one, the victims have been 32 years old or older. Well past the minimum age of consent, wouldn’t you say?”

“The what?”

“I mean, we live in a connubial society. All the roads of our culture lead to the American Home, which is not conceived as the citadel of celibacy; if the point requires any proof, we have only to consider, gentlemen, the delicious sense of naughtiness we get out of the mere phrase ‘bachelor apartment.’ Our women spend their maidenhood catching a husband and the rest of their lives trying to hold on to him; our men spend their entire boyhood envying their father and consequently can’t wait when they grow up to marry the next best thing to their mother. Why do you suppose the American male is obsessed with the mammae? What I’m trying to say—”

“Well, for heaven’s sake, say it!”

“—is that if you picked seven American adults at random, all of them over 25 years of age, six of them over 32, what are the odds that all but one of them will be unmarried?”

“O’Reilly,” said the Inspector in an awed voice. “By God, O’Reilly was the only one.”

“Or you could put it another way. Of the two men, Abernethy was a bachelor and O’Reilly was married. That seemed to cancel out the men. But of the five women, all have been single! When you stop to think of it, that’s really remarkable. Five women between the ages of 42 and 25 and not one of them succeeded in the great American rat race. As in the case of the descending ages, coincidence is unthinkable. Then the Cat deliberately chooses — among his female victims, at least — only unmarried ones. Why? Inform me.”