Ellery Queen - Cat of Many Tails

Accordingly a list of key questions, carefully composed so as to conceal their origin and objective, was drawn up by Dr. Cazalis and his board in collaboration with Inspector Queen. Each doctor co-operating received a confidential copy of this list. The individual physician was to do his own questioning, in his own office, of those patients on his suspect roll whom he considered it therapeutically risky to turn over to others. He agreed to file reports of these sessions with the board. Patients who in the judgment of their doctors could be safely interviewed by others were to be handled directly by the board at any one of their several offices. The police were not to come into contact with any patient except in the final stage of the medical inquiry, and then only where the findings compelled it. Even at this point the procedure was to emphasize the protection of the patient rather than the overriding hunt for damaging facts. Wherever possible in these cases the investigation was to proceed around the suspect instead of through him.

To the police it was a clumsy and irritating plan; but as Dr. Cazalis, who had begun to look haggard, pointed out to the Police Commissioner and Inspector Queen, the alternative was no investigation at all. The Inspector threw up his hands and his superior said politely that he had been looking forward to a rather more alluring prospect.

So, it appeared, had the Mayor. At an unhappy meeting in City Hall, Dr. Cazalis was inflexible: there were to be no further interviews with the press on his part or on the part of anyone associated with him in the psychiatric phase of the investigation. “I gave my professional word on that, Mr. Mayor. Let one patient’s name leak to the newpapers and the whole thing will blow up in my face.”

The Mayor replied with a plaintive, “Yes, yes, Dr. Cazalis, I hadn’t thought it through, I’m sure. Good luck, and keep right on it, won’t you?”

But when the psychiatrist had left, the Mayor remarked bitterly to his private secretary, “It’s that damned Ellery Queen business all over again. By the way, Birdy, whatever happened to that fellow?”

What had happened was that the Mayor’s Special Investigator had taken to the streets. Ellery might have been seen these days — and he was seen, by various Headquarters men — at eccentric hours lounging on the sidewalk across from the building on East 19th Street where Archibald Dudley Abernethy had come to an end, or standing in the hall outside the ex-Abernethy apartment, which was now occupied by a Guatemalan member of the United Nations secretariat and his wife, or wandering about Gramercy Park and Union Square; silently consuming pizza in the Italian restaurant on West 44th Street over which Violette Smith had flirted successfully with death, or leaning against the banister of the top floor hall listening to a piano stammer along behind the apartment door to which was thumbtacked a large sign:

poking about beneath the staircase in the lobby of a Chelsea tenement at the spot where the body of Rian O’Reilly had been found; sitting on a bench at the end of the Sheridan Square subway-station platform, uptown side, with the shade of Madcap Monica McKell; prowling beneath the washlines in a certain rear court on East 102nd Street and never once catching a glimpse of the emancipated cousin of fat little Simone Phillips; standing before the brassrailed stoop of a house on West 128th Street in a swarm of dark children, or strolling down Lenox Avenue among brown and saffron people to the 110th Street entrance to Central Park, or sitting on a park bench not far from the entrance or on the nearby boulder which had been the rock, if not the salvation, of Beatrice Willikins; or trudging along East 84th Street from Fifth Avenue to Madison past the canopied entrance of the Park-Lester and up Madison and back again to circumambulate the block, or taking the private elevator in the Park-Lester’s neighbor to a boarded-up penthouse whose occupants were away for the summer to stare frankly across the parapet at the terrace beyond which Lenore Richardson had gripped Forever Amber in the convulsion of strangulation.

Ellery rarely spoke to anyone on these excursions.

They took place by day as well as by night, as if he wished to view the sites in both perspectives.

He returned to the seven localities again and again. Once he was picked up by a detective who did not know him and spent several hours as a suspicious character in the nearest precinct house before Inspector Queen hurried in to identify him.

Had he been asked what he was about, the Mayor’s Special Investigator would have been at a loss for a communicable reply. It was difficult to put into words. How materialize a terror, much more see him whole? This was one whose feet had whispered over pavements, displacing nothing larger than molecules. You followed his trackless path, sniffing upwind, hopefully.

All that week the eighth tail of the Cat, the now familiar question mark, hooked and held the eye of New York.

Ellery was walking up Park Avenue. It was the Saturday night after Lenore Richardson’s murder and he was drifting in a vacuum.

He had left the night life of the City behind. In the 70s only piles of articulated stone kept him company, and an occasional goldbraided doorman.

At 78th Street Ellery paused before the royal blue-awninged house where the Cazalises lived. The ground-floor Cazalis apartment, with its private office entrance directly off the street, showed lights, but the vanes of the Venetian blinds were closed and Ellery wondered if Dr. Cazalis and his fellow-psychiatrists were at work behind them. Brewing the potion, stirring the caldron; wrapping truth in darkness. They would never find the Cat in their co-wizard’s notes. He did not know how he knew this, but he knew it.

He walked on and some time later found himself turning into 84th Street.

But he passed the Park-Lester without breaking the rhythm of his torpor.

At the corner of 84th and Fifth, Ellery stopped. It was still early, the evening was warm, but the Avenue was a nervous emptiness. Where were the Saturday night arm-in-arm strollers? Even the automobile traffic seemed lighter. And the busses whined by carrying remarkably few passengers.

Facing him across Fifth Avenue was the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a broadbeamed old lady sitting patiently in darkness.

He crossed over on the green light and began to walk uptown along the old lady’s flank. Beyond her lay the black and silent Park.

They’re beginning to stick to the well-lighted areas, he thought. O comfort-killing night, image of Hell. No friendly darkness now. Especially here. In this part of the jungle the beast had pounced twice. He almost cried out at the touch on his arm. “Sergeant.”

“I tailed you for two blocks before I recognized you,” said Sergeant Velie, falling into step.

“On duty tonight?”

“Naw.”

“Then what are you doing around here?”

“Oh... just walking around.” The big fellow said carelessly, “I’m baching it these days.”

“Why, where’s your family, Velie?”

“Sent the wife and kid to my mother-in-law’s for a month.”

“To Cincinnati? Is Barbara-Ann—?”

“No, Barbsy’s okay. And as far as school is concerned,” said Sergeant Velie argumentatively, “she can catch up any time. She’s got her ma’s brains.”

“Oh,” said Ellery; and they ambled on in silence.

After a long time the Sergeant said, “I’m not intruding on anything, I trust?”