Ellery Queen - Cat of Many Tails

“And when he slipped the silk cord around Celeste Phillips’s neck — the girl he mistook for his victim — Cazalis was playing the final scene for his audience. It’s significant that the tenth case was the only case in which the intended victim was able to cry out loudly enough to be heard. And while Cazalis tightened the cord sufficiently to leave realistic marks on the girl’s neck, it’s also significant that he permitted her to get her hands between the noose and her throat, that he did not knock her unconscious as the Cat had done in at least two of his assaults, and that Celeste Phillips was able within a short time of the attack to speak and act normally; what slight and temporary damage she sustained was chiefly the result of her own struggles and her terror. What Cazalis would have done had we not run into the alley to ‘stop’ him is conjectural; probably he would have permitted the girl to scream long enough without fatal injury to insure interference from some outside source. He could be certain detectives weren’t far away in the fog, and it was a congested section of the City.

“He wanted to be caught in the act of a Cat murder-attempt, he planned to be caught in the act of a Cat murder-attempt, and he was successful in being caught in the act of a Cat murder-attempt.”

“Whereupon it becomes evident,” murmured the old man, “that we approach our destination.”

“Yes. For a rational man to assume another’s guilt and to be willing to suffer another’s punishment, the rational mind can find only one justification: the one is shielding the other.

“Cazalis was concealing the Cat’s identity.

“Cazalis was protecting the Cat from detection, exposure, and punishment.

“And in doing so Cazalis was punishing himself out of deeply buried feelings of his own guilts as they centered about the Cat and his emotional involvement with the Cat.

“Do you agree, Professor Seligmann?”

But the old man said in a curious way: “I am only an observer along this road you travel, Mr. Queen. I neither agree nor disagree; I listen.”

Ellery laughed. “What did I now know about the Cat?

“That the Cat was someone with whom Cazalis was emotionally involved. With whom he was therefore in a close relationship.

“That the Cat was someone whom Cazalis had an overpowering wish to protect and whose criminal guilt is tied in Cazalis’s mind to his own neurotic guilts.

“That the Cat was a psychotic with a determinable psychotic reason for seeking out and murdering people who a generation and more before had been brought into the world by Cazalis the obstetrician.

“That, finally, the Cat was someone who has had equal access with Cazalis to his old obstetrical records, which have been stored in a locked closet in his home.”

Seligmann paused in the act of putting the meerschaum back into his mouth.

“Is there such a person, I asked myself? To my certain knowledge?

“There is. To my certain knowledge,” said Ellery. “Just one.

“Mrs. Cazalis.”

“For Mrs. Cazalis,” said Ellery, “is the only living person who fits the specifications I have just drawn.

“Mrs. Cazalis is the only living person with whom Cazalis is emotionally involved in a close relationship; in his closest relationship.

“Mrs. Cazalis is the only living person whom Cazalis would have a compulsion to protect and for whose guilt Cazalis would feel intensely responsible... whose criminal guilt would be tied in his mind to his own neurotic guilt feelings.

“Mrs. Cazalis has a determinable — the only determinable — psychotic reason for seeking out and murdering people her husband had brought into the world.

“And that Mrs. Cazalis has had equal access with her husband to his obstetrical records is self-evident.”

Seligmann did not change expression. He seemed neither surprised nor impressed. “I am chiefly interested in pursuing your third point. What you have called Mrs. Cazalis’s ‘determinable psychotic reason’ for murdering. How do you demonstrate this?”

“By another extension of that method of mine you’ve characterized as unknown to science, Herr Professor. I knew that Mrs. Cazalis had lost two children in giving birth. I knew, from something Cazalis told me, that after the second delivery she was no longer able to bear children. I knew that she had thereafter become extremely attached to her sister’s only child, Lenore Richardson, to the point where her niece was more her daughter than her sister’s. I knew, or I had convinced myself, that Cazalis had proved inadequate to his sexual function as a husband. Certainly during the long period of his breakdowns and subsequent treatment he must have been a source of continual frustration to his wife. And she was only 19 when they married.

“From the age of 19, then,” said Ellery, “I saw Mrs. Cazalis as leading an unnatural, tense existence, complicated by strong maternal desires which were thwarted by the deaths of her two infants, her inability to have another child, and what could only have been a highly unsatisfactory and unsettling transference of her thwarted feelings to her niece. She knew that Lenore could never really be hers; Lenore’s mother is neurotic, jealous, possessive, infantile, and interfering — a source of unending trouble. Mrs. Cazalis is not an outgoing individual and apparently she never was. Her frustrations, then, grew inward; she contained them... for a long time.

“Until, in fact, she was past 40.

“Then she cracked.

“I say, Professor Seligmann, that one day Mrs. Cazalis told herself something that thenceforward became her only reason for living.

“Once she believed that, she was lost. Lost in the distorted world of psychosis.

“Because, Professor, I believe the oddest thing occurred. Mrs. Cazalis did not have to know that her husband thought he had murdered their children at birth; in fact, she undoubtedly did not know it — in her rational life — or their marriage would hardly have survived the knowledge for so many years. But I think she arrived at approximately the same point in her psychosis.

“I think she finally told herself: My husband gave thousands of living babies to other women, but when I was to have my own babies he gave me dead ones. So my husband killed them. He won’t let me have my children, so I won’t let them have their children. He killed mine; I’ll kill theirs.” And Ellery said, “Would it be possible for me to have more of that wonderful non-Viennese coffee, Professor Seligmann?”

“Ach.” Seligmann reached over and tugged at a bellpull. Frau Bauer appeared. “Elsa, are we barbarians? More coffee.”

“It’s all ready,” snapped Frau Bauer in German. And as she returned with two fat, steaming pots and fresh cups and saucers, she said, “I know you, you old Schuft. You are in one of your suicidal moods.” And she flounced out, banging the door.

“This is my life,” said the old man. He was regarding Ellery with bright eyes. “Do you know, Herr Queen, this is extraordinary. I can only sit and admire.”

“Yes?” said Ellery, not quite following but grateful for the gift of the jinni.

“For you have arrived, by an uncharted route, at the true destination.

“The trained eye looks upon your Mrs. Cazalis and one says: Here is a quiet, submissive type of woman. She is withdrawn, seclusive, asocial, frigid, slightly suspicious and hypercritical — I speak, of course, of the time when I knew her. Her husband is handsome, successful, and in his work — his obstetrical work — he is constantly in contact with other women, but in their married life her husband and she have disturbing conflicts and tensions. She has managed nevertheless to make an adjustment to life; in — as it were — a limping fashion.