“I’s a poser, all right,” his father muttered.
“It’s true I might announce tonight that no New Yorker 25 years old or older had anything to worry about because the Cat’s going down the actuarial tables and he’s passed Age 25...”
“Very funny,” said the Inspector feebly. “It sounds like — like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan. They’d all think you were crazy and if they thought you were sane it would only pack all the anxiety down into the — the lower brackets.”
“Something like that,” nodded Ellery. “So I kept it to myself.
“Two.” He crushed the cigaret out and cradled his head, staring at the ceiling. “Of the seven victims, two have been male, five female. Until this last one, the victims have been 32 years old or older. Well past the minimum age of consent, wouldn’t you say?”
“The what?”
“I mean, we live in a connubial society. All the roads of our culture lead to the American Home, which is not conceived as the citadel of celibacy; if the point requires any proof, we have only to consider, gentlemen, the delicious sense of naughtiness we get out of the mere phrase ‘bachelor apartment.’ Our women spend their maidenhood catching a husband and the rest of their lives trying to hold on to him; our men spend their entire boyhood envying their father and consequently can’t wait when they grow up to marry the next best thing to their mother. Why do you suppose the American male is obsessed with the mammae? What I’m trying to say—”
“Well, for heaven’s sake, say it!”
“—is that if you picked seven American adults at random, all of them over 25 years of age, six of them over 32, what are the odds that all but one of them will be unmarried?”
“O’Reilly,” said the Inspector in an awed voice. “By God, O’Reilly was the only one.”
“Or you could put it another way. Of the two men, Abernethy was a bachelor and O’Reilly was married. That seemed to cancel out the men. But of the five women, all have been single! When you stop to think of it, that’s really remarkable. Five women between the ages of 42 and 25 and not one of them succeeded in the great American rat race. As in the case of the descending ages, coincidence is unthinkable. Then the Cat deliberately chooses — among his female victims, at least — only unmarried ones. Why? Inform me.”
Inspector Queen gnawed his nails. “The only thing I can think of is that he dangles the marriage bait in order to get in close. But—”
“But that just isn’t the explanation, right. No such Lothario’s turned up, or the slightest trace of one.
“Of course, I could have cried the glad tidings to Mrs. New York that the only females who need fear the embrace of the Cat are virgins, misogamists, and Lesbians, but—”
“Go on,” snarled his father.
“Three: Abernethy was strangled with a blue silk cord, Violette Smith with a salmon-colored one, O’Reilly blue, Monica McKell salmon, Simone Phillips salmon, Beatrice Willikins salmon, Lenore Richardson salmon. There’s even a report on that.”
Mumbled the Inspector: “I’d forgotten that.”
“One color for the males, another for the females. Consistently. Why?”
After a time the Inspector said, rather timidly: “The other day, son, you mentioned a fourth point...”
“Oh. Yes. They all had phones.”
His father rubbed an eye.
“In a way, the very prosiness of the point makes it the most provocative. To me, anyway. Seven victims, seven phones. Even Simone, the poor cripple. They all had phones or, where the subscriber was someone else — as in the cases of Lenore Richardson, Simone Phillips, and Monica McKell — they had separate listings in the directory; I checked.
“I don’t know the figures, but I should imagine there’s a ratio of some twenty-five phones in the United States per hundred population. One out of four. In the big urban centers, like New York, the percentage may be greater. Let’s say in New York one out of three. Yet of the seven victims tagged by the Cat, not one, not two, not four, but all seven had phones.
“The first explanation to suggest itself is that the Cat picks his dainties out of the phone book. Pure lottery. But in a lottery the odds against picking seven victims successively each of whoms turns out to be younger than the last would be literally incalculable. Then the Cat makes his selections on some other basis.
“Still, all his victims are listed in the Manhattan directory. Those phones are a point, a point.”
Ellery set the ashtray on his night table and swung his legs off the bed to squat, mourner-fashion. “It’s damnable,” he moaned. “If there were one break in the sequence — one victim older than the last, one woman strangled who was married or who’d ever been married, one man found necktied in salmon — or heliotrope! — one who didn’t have a phone... Those points in common exist for reasons. Or maybe,” said Ellery, sitting up suddenly, “or maybe the points in common exist for the same reason. A sort of great common denominator. The Rosetta stone. One key to all the doors. Do you know, that would be nice.”
But Inspector Queen was mumbling as he stripped. “That getting-younger business. When you think of it... Two years’ difference in age between Abernethy and Violette. Two years between Vi and O’Reilly. Three years between O’Reilly and McKell’s sister. Two years between her and Celeste’s sister. Three years between her and Beatrice Willikins. Two and three. Never more than three. In six cases. And then-”
“Yes,” said Ellery, “and then Lenore Richardson and we find a jump in the age differential from a previous maximal three to seven... That haunted me all last night.”
And now the Inspector was denuded, his little sexagenarian hide impaled on the point of a needle.
“What’s haunting me,” he mumbled, “is who’s next?”
Ellery turned away.
“And that’s all you had, son?”
“That’s all I have.”
“I’m going to bed.” The little naked man shuffled out.
5
Inspector Queen overslept. He came galloping out at 9:45 Tuesday morning like a late starter under the whip, but when he saw who was having coffee with Ellery he slowed to a walk which neatly ended at the breakfast table.
“Well, look who’s among us,” beamed the Inspector. “Good morning, McKell.”
“Morning, Inspector.” said Jimmy McKell. “On your way to the abattoir?”
“Mmmmmmmmch,” inhaled the Inspector. “I think I’ll have a slup or two of the life-giving mocha myself.” He pulled out a chair and sat down. “Morning son.”
“Morning, morning,” said Ellery absently, reaching for the coffeepot. “Jimmy came up with the papers.”
“Do people still read?”
“Cazalis’s interview.”
“Oh.”
“Goodnaturedly but firmly neutral. The calm voice of organized knowledge. We promise nothing. But one has the feeling that an Osirian hand directed by a radiant eye has taken over. The Mayor must be in the eleventh heaven.”
“I thought it was seven,” said Jimmy McKell.
“Not in the Egyptian cosmography, Jimmy. And there is something Pharaonic about Cazalis. ‘Soldiers, from these pyramids forty centuries look down upon you.’”
“Napoleon.”
“In Egypt. Cazalis is soothing syrup to the general. Simply wonderful for morale.”
“Don’t mind him,” grinned the Inspector, reading the paper. “You’ll never win... Say, this is pretty good medicine at that. You given up journalism, McKell? I didn’t spot you among the rest of the scavengers yesterday.”
“The Richardson deal?” Jimmy looked secretive. “Yesterday was Labor Day. My day. I’m a working stiff.”