Ellery Queen - Cat of Many Tails

“She has done nothing to warrant special notice. In fact, she has always been overshadowed by her husband and dominated by him.

“Then, in her 40s, something occurs. For years, secretly, she has been jealous of her husband’s rapport with younger women, his psychiatric patients — for it is interesting to note that in recent years, as Cazalis told me in Zürich, he has had an almost totally female clientele. She has not required ‘proof,’ for she has always been of a schizoid tendency; besides, there was probably nothing to ‘prove.’ No matter. Mrs. Cazalis’s schizoid tendency bursts forth in a delusional state.

“A frank paranoid psychosis.

“She develops the delusion that her own babies were killed by her husband. In order to deprive her of them. She may even think that he is the father of some of the children whose successful deliveries he performed. With or without the idea that her husband is their father, she sets out to kill them in retaliation.

“Her psychosis is controlled in her inner life. It is not expressed to the world except in her crimes.

“This is how the psychiatrist might describe the murderer you have delineated.

“As you see, Mr. Queen, the destination is the same.”

“Except that mine,” said Ellery, his smile slightly bitter, “seems to have been approached poetically. I recall the artist who kept depicting the stranger as a cat and I warm to his remarkable intuition. Doesn’t a tigress — that grandmother of cats — go ‘mad’ with rage when she is robbed of her cubs? Then, Professor, there’s the old saying, A woman hath nine lives like a cat. Mrs. Cazalis has nine lives to her debit, too. She killed and she killed until...”

“Yes?”

“Until one day Cazalis entertained a ghastly visitor.”

“The truth.”

Ellery nodded. “It could have come about in one of a number of ways. He might have stumbled on the hiding place of her stock of silk cords and recalled their visit to India years before and her purchase — not his — of the cords. Or perhaps it was one or two of the victims’ names striking a chord of memory; then it would require merely a few minutes with his old files to open his eyes. Or he may have noticed his wife acting oddly, followed her, and was too late to avert a tragedy but in quite sufficient time to grasp its sickening significance. He would go back in his mind to the recent past and discover that on the night of each murder he could not vouch for her whereabouts. Also, Cazalis suffers from chronic insomnia and he takes sleeping pills regularly; this, he would realize, had given her unlimited opportunities. And for purposes of slipping in and out of the building at night unobserved by the apartment house employees, there was always Cazalis’s office door, giving access directly to the street. As for the daytimes, a woman’s daytime excursions are rarely examined by her husband; in our American culture, in all strata, ‘shopping’ is the magic word, explaining everything... Cazalis may even have seen how, in the cunning of her paranoia, his wife had skipped over numerous eligibles on the list in order to strike at her niece — the most terrible of her murders, the murder of the unsatisfying substitute for her dead children — in order that she might maneuver Cazalis into the investigation and through him keep informed as to everything the police and I knew and planned.

“In any event, as a psychiatrist Cazalis would immediately grasp the umbilical symbolism in her choice of cords to strangle — as it were — babies; certainly the infantile significance of her consistent use of blue cords for male victims and pink cords for females could not have escaped him. He could trace her psychosis, then, to the traumatic source upon which her delusion had seized. It could only be the delivery room in which she had lost her own two children. Under ordinary circumstances this would have been a merely clinical, if personally agonizing, observation, and Cazalis would either have taken the medical and legal steps usual in such cases or, if the prospect of revealing the truth to the world involved too much pain, mortification, and obloquy, he would at the least have put her where she could do no more harm.

“But the circumstances were not ordinary. There were his own old feelings of guilt which had expressed themselves through and revolved about that same delivery room. Perhaps it was the shock of realizing what lay behind his wife’s mental illness that revived the guilt feelings he had thought were dissolved. However it came about, Cazalis must have found himself in the clutch of his old neurosis, its tenacity increased a thousandfold by the shock of the discovery that had brought it alive again. Soon he was persuaded by his neurosis that it was all his fault; that had he not ‘murdered’ their two babies she would not have erupted into psychosis. The sin, then, was his; he alone was ‘responsible,’ therefore he alone must suffer the punishment.

“So he sent his wife south in the care of her sister and brother-in-law, he took the remaining silk cords from his wife’s hiding place and stored them in a place identifiable with him alone, and he set about proving to the authorities that he, Edward Cazalis, was the monster the City of New York had been hunting frantically for five months. His subsequent ‘confession’ in detail was the easiest part of it by far; he was fully informed through his affiliation with the case of all the facts known to the police, and upon a foundation of these facts he was able to build a plausible, convincing structure. How much of his behavior at this point and since has been playacting and how much actual disturbance I can’t, of course, venture to say.

“And that, Professor Seligmann, is my story,” said Ellery in a tightened voice, “and if you have any information that controverts in, this is the time to speak out.”

He found that he was shivering and he blamed it on the fire, which was low. It was hissing a little, as if to call attention to its plight.

Old Seligmann raised himself and devoted a few minutes to the Promethean chore of bringing warmth back to the room.

Ellery waited.

Suddenly, without turning, the old man grumbled: “Perhaps it would be wisdom, Herr Queen, to send that cable now.”

Ellery sighed.

“May I telephone instead? You can’t say much in a cable, and if I can talk to my father a great deal of time will have been saved.”

“I shall place the call for you.” The old man shuffled to his desk. As he took the telephone, he added with a twitch of humor, “My German — at least on the European side, Mr. Queen — will undoubtedly prove less expensive than yours.”

They might have been calling one of the more distant planets. They sat in silence sipping their coffee, attuned to a ring which did not come.

The day was running out and the study began to blur and lose its character.

Once Frau Bauer stormed in. Her bristling entrance startled them. But their unnatural silence and the twilight they sat in startled her. She tiptoed about, switching on lamps. Then, like a mouse, she skittered out.

Once Ellery laughed, and the old man raised his head.

“I’ve just thought of something absurd, Professor Seligmann. In the four months since I first laid eyes on her, I’ve never called her or thought of her or referred to her as anything but ‘Mrs. Cazalis.’”

“And what should you call her,” said the old man grumpily, “Ophelia?”

“I never did learn her Christian name. I don’t know it at this moment. Just Mrs. Cazalis... the great man’s shadow. Yet from the night she murdered her niece she was always there. On the edges. A face in the background. Putting in an occasional — but very important — word. Making idiots of us all, including her husband. It makes one wonder, Herr Professor, what the advantages are of so-called sanity.”