Ellery Queen - Cat of Many Tails

“He still has guilt feelings. He must have. It’s the only explanation for what he’s done, Professor.”

“What he has done? You mean, Mr. Queen, murdering nine persons?”

“No.”

“He has done something else?”

“Yes.”

“In addition to the nine murders?”

“To the exclusion,” said Ellery, “of the nine murders.”

Seligmann rapped the bowl of his meerschaum on the arm of the chair.

“Come, mein Herr. You speak in riddles. Precisely what is it that you do mean?”

“I mean,” said Ellery, “that Cazalis is innocent of the charge for which he is going to trial in New York tomorrow morning.”

“Innocent?”

“I mean, Professor Seligmann, that Cazalis did not kill those nine people. Cazalis is not — and never was — the Cat.”

Seligmann said, “Let us expose Fate, whose other name is Bauer.” He bellowed, “Elsa!”

Frau Bauer appeared, pure jinni.

“Elsa—” began the old man.

But Frau Bauer interrupted, stumbling from a secure “Herr Professor” into uncertain English so that Ellery knew her remarks were intended for his ears also. “You have breakfast eaten when it is already lunch. Lunch you have not eaten. Now comes your time to rest.” Fists on bony hips, Frau Bauer glared challenge to the non-Viennese world.

“I’m so very sorry, Professor—”

“For what, Mr. Queen? Elsa.” The old man spoke gently, in German. “You’ve listened at the door. You’ve insulted my guest. Now you wish to rob me of my few remaining hours of consciousness. Must I hypnotize you?”

Frau Bauer whitened. She fled.

“It is my only weapon against her,” chuckled the old man. “I threaten to put her under hypnosis and send her into the Soviet zone to serve as the plaything of Moscow. It is not a matter of morals with Elsa; it is sheer horror. She would as soon get in bed with the Antichrist. You were telling me, Mr. Queen, that Cazalis is innocent after all?”

“Yes.”

The old man sat back, smiling. “Do you arrive at this conclusion by way of your unique scientifically unknown method of analysis, or is it based upon fact? Such fact as would, for example, satisfy your courts of law.”

“It’s based on a fact which would satisfy anyone above the mental age of five, Professor Seligmann,” Ellery retorted. “Its very simplicity, I think, has obscured it. Its simplicity and the fact that the murders have been so numerous and have dragged on for so long. Too, it’s been the kind of case in which the individuality of the victims has tended to blur and blend as the murders multiplied, until at the end one looked back on a homogeneous pile of carcasses, so many head of cattle passed through the slaughter pen. The same sort of reaction one got looking at the official pictures of the corpses of Belsen, Buchenwald, Oswiecim, and Maidanek. No particularity. Just death.”

“But the fact, Mr. Queen.” With a flick of impatience, and something else. And suddenly Ellery recalled that Béla Seligmann’s only daughter, married to a Polish Jewish doctor, had died at Treblinka. Love particularizes death, Ellery thought. And little else.

“Oh, the fact,” he said. “Why, it’s a mere matter of beginners’ physics, Professor. You attended the Zürich convention earlier this year, you told me. Exactly when this year?”

The white brows met. “The end of May, was it not?”

“The meeting lasted ten days and the concluding session was held on the night of June 3. On the night of June 3 Dr. Edward Cazalis of the United States read a paper entitled Ochlophobia, Nyctophobia, and Ponophobia in the convention hall before a large audience. As reported in a Zürcher scientific journal, the speaker scheduled to precede Cazalis, a Dane, ran far over his allotted time, to virtually the adjournment hour. Out of courtesy to Dr. Cazalis, however, who had attended all the sessions — according to a footnote in the journal — the American was permitted to deliver his paper. Cazalis began reading around midnight and finished at a few minutes past 2 o’clock in the morning. The convention was then adjourned for the year. The official adjournment time was 2:24 A.M. 4th June.”

Ellery shrugged. “The time difference between Zürich and New York being six hours, midnight of June 3 in Zürich, which is when Cazalis began reading his paper to the convention, was 6 P.M. June 3 in New York; 2 A.M. June 4 in Zurich, which is about when Cazalis finished reading his paper there, was 8 P.M. June 3 in New York. Assuming the absurd — that Cazalis whisked himself from the convention hall immediately on adjournment or even as he stepped off the platform at the conclusion of his talk, that he had already checked out of his hotel and had his luggage waiting, that the slight matter of his visa had been taken care of, that there was a plane ready to take off for the United States at the Zürich airport the instant he reached there (for which specific plane Cazalis had a ticket, notwithstanding Dr. Naardvoessler’s windiness, the unusual hour, or the impossibility of having foreseen the delay), that this plane flew to New York nonstop, that at Newark Airport or La Guardia Cazalis found a police motorcycle escort waiting to conduct his taxi through traffic at the highest possible speed — assuming all this nonsense, Herr Professor, at which hour could Edward Cazalis have reached midtown Manhattan, would you say? The earliest conceivable hour?”

“I have a poor acquaintance with the progress — if that is the word — of aeronautics.”

“Could the entire leap through space — from a platform in Zurich to a street in Manhattan — have been accomplished in three and a half to four hours, Professor Seligmann?”

“Obviously not.”

“So I telephoned to you. Whereupon it came out that Edward Cazalis did not go from the convention hall to an airfield that night. Came but not as speculation but as fact. For you told me you had kept Cazalis up talking in your hotel room in Zürich all through that night until ‘long past dawn.’ Surely that would mean, at the very earliest, 6 A.M.? Let’s say 6 A.M., Professor, to please me; it must have been, of course, even later. 6 A.M. in Zurich on the 4th of June would be midnight in New York on June 3. Do you recall my giving you the date of the first Cat murder? The murder of the man named Abernethy?”

“Dates are a nuisance. And there were so many.”

“Exactly. There were so many, and it was so long ago. Well, according to our Medical Examiner’s report, Abernethy was strangled ‘around midnight’ of June 3. As I said, a matter of simple physics. Cazalis has demonstrated many talents, but the ability to be in two places thousands of miles apart at the same moment is not one of them.”

The old man exclaimed, “But, as you say, this is so basic! And your police, your prosecutors, have not perceived this physical impossibility?”

“There were nine murders and an attempted tenth. The time-stretch was almost exactly five months. Cazalis’s old obstetrical files, the strangling cords hidden in his psychiatric case history files, the circumstances of his capture, his detailed and voluntary confession — all these have created an over-whelming presumption of his guilt. The authorities may have slipped through overconfidence, or carelessness, or because they found that in the majority of the murders Cazalis could physically have committed the crimes. Remember, there is no direct evidence linking Cazalis with any of the murders; the people’s entire case must rest on that tenth attempt. Here the evidence is direct enough. Cazalis was captured while he was in the act of tightening the noose about the throat of the girl who was wearing Marilyn Soames’s borrowed coat. The noose of tussah silk. The Cat’s noose. Ergo, he’s the Cat. Why think of alibis?