They roared with open siren from the Battery to the Harlem River, from Riverside Drive to First Avenue. They were in on the breakup of a teenage street fight in San Juan Hill and the arrest of a cocaine addict caught trying to slip a forged prescription by an alert Yorkville pharmacist. They visited the scenes of holdups, traffic accidents, minor assaults; on the agenda in order were a queue-pulling match off Chatham Square, an attempted rape in a Hell’s Kitchen hallway, the case of a getaway car in a Third Avenue pawnshop robbery. They witnessed the bloodless capture of a meek gangster in Little Italy wanted for questioning in an old homicide, the escape of a Lithuanian cook from a Little Hungary restaurant where he had suddenly gone berserk. There were four suicides — above the average for such a short period, the detectives explained, but it had been a bad summer, one in the Bowling Green subway station, an elderly Brooklynite who had thrown himself in the path of an incoming IRT express; another a Herald Square window-jumping case, a girl registered in a hotel from Chicopee Falls, Mass., identified as an eloper; another a gas range job in a Rivington Street tenement, a woman and a baby; the fourth an alcoholic case in the West 130s who had slashed his wrists. There were two homicide calls: the first, shortly before noon, a knifing in a Harlem poolroom; the second, at 6:30, a woman beaten to death with a Stillson wrench in the East 50s by her husband, an advertising agency executive. This last aroused some interest in the detectives since it involved another man, a Broadway character, and they were disposed to finger; but Ellery waved them on.
There were no strangulations, with or without cords.
“Just another day,” said the detective at the wheel as he slid the squad car into 87th Street. He sounded apologetic.
“Why not keep going tonight?” suggested the other detective as Ellery got out. “Saturday night’s always lively, Mr. Queen, and maybe it’s the Cat’s night out.”
“By the twitching of my left ventricle,” said Ellery, “I can tell it isn’t. Doesn’t matter, anyway — I can always read about it in the papers. Will you boys join me in a friendly glass?”
“Well, now,” said the driver.
But the other detective said, “Give your old woman a break for once, Frank. And I’ve got a long haul, Mr. Queen. Out to Rockville Center. Thanks just the same.”
Upstairs, Ellery found a note from his father.
It was a scribble marked 7 P.M.
EL — Been phoning since 5. Dashed home to leave this note. Meet me at Cazalis’s the minute you get in. Big powwow set for 7:30.
7:35.
Ellery ran.
When the uniformed maid ushered him into the Cazalis living room, the first person he saw was the Mayor of the City of New York. That harrowed servant of the people was lying back in an easychair, hands clasped about a tall glass, glaring at a bust of Sigmund Freud above Ellery’s head.
The Police Commissioner, seated beside the Mayor, was studying the fume of his cigar.
Dr. Cazalis sat on a Turkish divan, bolstered by silk pillows. His wife held on to his hand.
At a window stood Inspector Queen, cocooned in silence.
The air was chill.
“Don’t tell me, please,” said Ellery. “It’s a washout.”
No one replied. Mrs. Cazalis rose and prepared a Scotch-and-soda, which Ellery accepted with genuine gratitude.
“Ellery, where have you been today?” But the Inspector failed to sound as if he cared.
“Out chasing radio calls. Don’t be misled, Mr. Mayor,” said Ellery. “It’s the first time since I took over. Hereafter I’ll do my special investigating from an armchair — that is, if there is a hereafter?”
The Mayor’s glance touched him briefly, almost with loathing. “Sit down, Queen, sit down.”
“Nobody’s answered my question.”
“It wasn’t a question, it was a statement,” said Dr. Cazalis from the pillows. “And as a statement it exactly states the case.”
“Sit down, Queen,” snapped the Mayor again.
“Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I’ll keep my father company.” Ellery was startled by Dr. Cazalis’s appearance. His pale eyes were inflamed and his skin was plowed so raw that Ellery thought of floodwater soil eroded into gullies; the glacier had given way. And he recalled Cazalis’s remark about his insomnia. “Doctor, you look depreciated.”
“There’s been considerable wear and tear.”
“He’s worn out,” said Mrs. Cazalis shrilly. “He drives himself so. No more sense than an infant. He’s been at this day and night since...”
Her husband squeezed her hand. “The whole psychiatric attack, Mr. Queen, is a fizzle. We’ve got exactly nowhere.”
Inspector Queen said curtly: “This week I’ve been working close to Dr. Cazalis, Ellery. We wound up today. There were a number of possibilities. We ran every one of them down.”
“Quietly, you understand,” said the Mayor bitterly. “No toes stepped on. Not a word in the papers.”
“Well,” said Dr. Cazalis, “it was a long chance at best. My fault entirely. It seemed a notion at the time.”
“At the time, Edward? Isn’t it still?” Mrs. Cazalis was regarding her husband in a puzzled way.
“Humpty Dumpty, dear.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I take it, Queen,” said the Mayor, “you haven’t got to first base?”
“I never took the bat off my shoulder, Mr. Mayor.”
“I see.” Here goes a Special Investigator, thought Ellery. “Inspector Queen, what’s your feeling?”
“We have a very touchy case, Mr. Mayor. In the usual murder investigation, the range of suspicion is limited. The husband, the ‘friend,’ the handyman, the rival, the enemy, and so on. Motive begins to stick out. The field narrows. Opportunity narrows it even further. We’ve got human material to work on. Sooner or later in even the most complicated case we make a rap stick. But in this one... How are you going to narrow the field? Where do you start? No connection among the victims anywhere. No suspects. No clues. Every murder a dead end. The Cat could be anybody in New York.”
“You can still say that, Inspector?” cried the Mayor. “After all these weeks?”
The Inspector’s lips thinned. “I’m ready to hand in my shield right now.”
“No, no, Inspector, I was just thinking aloud.” The Mayor glanced at his Police Commissioner. “Well, Barney, where do we go from here?”
The Commissioner tapped a long ash very carefully into a tray. “When you get right down to it, there’s no place we can go. We’ve done, and we’re doing, everything humanly possible. I could suggest a new Police Commissioner, Jack, but I doubt if that would satisfy anybody except the Extra and the other crowd, and I’m Irish enough to believe it wouldn’t necessarily bag your Cat, either.”
The Mayor waved, impatiently. “The question is, are we doing everything possible? It seems to me where we may have gone off is in assuming that the Cat is a New Yorker. Suppose he comes from Bayonne? Stamford? Yonkers? He may be a commuter—”
“Or a Californian,” said Ellery.
“What? What was that?” exclaimed the Mayor.
“A Californian, or an Illinoisan, or a Hawaiian.”
The Mayor said irritably, “Queen, I can’t see that that sort of talk gets us anywhere. The point is, Barney, have we done anything outside the City?”
“Everything we can.”
“We’ve had every community within a radius of fifty miles of the City alerted for at least six weeks,” said the Inspector. “From the start they’ve been requested to keep their eyes peeled for psychos. But so far—”
“Jack, until we get a concrete reason for believing otherwise, nobody can crucify us for concentrating on Manhattan.”