Ellery Queen - Cat of Many Tails

“I want to know what cooks!”

“Why all the heat?” growled Inspector Queen. “You’ll have me thinking in a minute...”

“Right.” Jimmy sat down suddenly. “There’s nothing to think. Simone was Celeste’s third cousin or something. Celeste’s parents were killed in a gas stove explosion when she was a baby. Mrs. Phillips was her only relative in New York and took her in. That’s all there is to it. When Mrs. Phillips died, Celeste naturally took care of Simone; they always considered each other sisters. I know a hell of a lot of real sisters who wouldn’t have done what Celeste did!”

“Even speaking not Delphically,” said Ellery, “so do I.”

“What?”

“Go on, Jimmy.”

“She’s crazy to get a college education — it half-killed her when she had to give it up at Mrs. Phillips’s death. The books that kid’s read! Deep stuff — philosophy, psychology — why, Celeste knows more right now than I do, and I’ve got a Princeton sheepskin acquired by sweat, toil, and grand larceny. Now that Simone’s gone, the kid’s free to live her own life again, go back to school and make something of herself. She’s going to enroll this week in Washington Square College for the fall semester. She wants a B.A., majoring in English and philosophy, and then she’ll go on to graduate work. Maybe teach.”

“She must want it a great deal to cut out a program like that for herself on a night school basis.”

“Night school? Who said anything about night school?”

“We still live in a competitive economy, Jimmy. Or,” said Ellery cheerfully, “were you thinking of taking that problem off her hands?”

“Maybe,” said the Inspector with a wink, “maybe that question is irrelevant, immaterial, and none of our business.”

Jimmy gripped the table. “Are you crumbums suggesting—?”

“No, no, Jimmy. With benefit of clergy, of course.”

“Oh. Well... let’s leave me out of it.” His homely face was angry and watchful.

“She can’t work as a model daytimes and go to day college too, Jimmy,” said Ellery.

“She’s giving up that job.”

“Really?” said the Inspector.

“Oh,” said Ellery, “she’s got herself a night job.”

“No job at all!”

“I’m afraid,” said Ellery mournfully, “I lost you somewhere back in the third canto. No job at all? How is she going to support herself?”

“With Simone’s nestegg!” Jimmy was shouting now.

“Nestegg?”

“What er... what nestegg would that be, Jimmy?” asked the Inspector.

“Look.” Jimmy inflated his chest. “You asked me to do a dirty chore and I’ve done it. I don’t understand this, any of it. But assuming you’re a big wheel in the gray cell department, Queen, and I’m just a little screw rattling around, will you tell me what the devil difference any of this makes?”

“No more difference than the truth ever makes.”

“Sounds profound, but I suspect a gimmick.”

“McKell.” Inspector Queen was grim. “I’ve had a lot of men working on this case and I’ve been in it myself up to my Adam’s apple. This is the first I’ve heard about Simone Phillip’s leaving anybody anything but a lower back ache. Why didn’t Celeste tell us?”

“Because she only found it last week! Because it’s got nothing to do with the murder!”

“Found it?” murmured Ellery. “Where?”

“She was cleaning out Simone’s junk. There was an old wooden table clock, a French deal that was a family heirloom or something — it hadn’t run for ten years and Simone would never let Celeste have it fixed, kept it on a shelf over her bed. Well, when Celeste took it down last week it slipped out of her hands and cracked open like an egg on the floor. There was a big roll of bills inside, bound with a rubber band.”

“Money? I thought Simone—”

“So did Celeste. The money had been left by Simone’s father. There was a note in his handwriting bound in with the bills. According to the note, written just before he committed suicide, from the date on it, he managed to save $10,000 out of the wreckage when he dropped his fortune in the ’29 market crash. He had left the ten grand to his wife.”

“And Celeste knew nothing about it?”

“Mrs. Phillips and Simone never mentioned it to her. Most of the dough is there, about $8600. Celeste thinks the missing $1400 went toward Simone’s doctors’ bills in the early days, when Mrs. Phillips still had hopes she could be cured. Certainly Simone knew all about it, because she had fits if Celeste went anywhere near the clock. Well, now the money is Celeste’s and it’s going to make life tolerable for her for a while. And that’s the great big mysterious story,” said Jimmy with outthrust jaw, “the moral of which — if you ask me — is that, invalid or no invalid, Simone was a firstclass drip. Imagine letting that poor kid nurse her in the Black Hole of Calcutta and shag her legs off trying to support both of them when all the time Simone had almost nine grand stashed away! What was she keeping it for, the junior prom?... What’s the matter? Why the steely looks?”

“What do you think, Dad?”

“Any way you slice it, Ellery, it’s a motive.”

“Motive?” said Jimmy.

“The first one we’ve found.” The Inspector went to a window, looking unhappy.

Jimmy McKell began to laugh. But then he stopped laughing.

“I wondered last week if there might be a motive,” said Ellery, thoughtfully. “When she came here.”

“Celeste?”

Ellery did not reply.

“I know,” said Jimmy. “This is something out of H. G. Wells. An unknown gas drifts into the earth’s atmosphere out of interstellar space and everybody in the world goes fay. Including the great Ellery Queen. Why, Queen,” he snarled, “she came here to help you find the killer of Simone!”

“Who, it develops, wasn’t her sister and had deliberately held her in peonage for years.”

“Give me air. Sweet, sane air.”

“I’m not saying it’s so, Jimmy. But by the same token can you say it isn’t?”

“Damned right I can! That kid is as pure as I was till I stumbled into this Siberian Casbah this-morning and got polluted! Besides, I thought you were looking for the Cat — seven-times strangler!”

“Ellery.” Inspector Queen came back to the table. He had apparently fought an engagement with himself and won it. Or lost it. “It’s out of the question. Not that girl.”

“Now there’s a man,” shouted Jimmy, “who’s still got one toenail on the ground!”

Ellery stared into his cooling coffee. “Jimmy, have you ever heard of the ABC theory of multiple murder?”

“The what?”

“X wants to kill D. X’s motive isn’t apparent, but if he killed D in the ordinary way the police investigation would disclose eventually that the only person, or most likely person, with motive to kill D was X. X’s problem is, How can he kill D and gain his object without having his motive stand out? X sees that one way to accomplish this is by surrounding D’s murder with a smokescreen of other murders, deliberately committed with the same technique in order to tie them up as a series of interrelated crimes. Consequently, X first murders A, B, and C... wholly innocent people, you understand, with whom he’s not in the least involved. Only then does he murder D.

“The effect of this is to make the murder of D appear merely a single link in a chain of crimes. The police will not be looking for someone with motive against D, they will look for someone with motive against A, B, C, and D. But since X had no motive whatever for murdering A, B, and C, his motive against D is either overlooked or ignored. At least, that’s the theory.”