He denied indignantly having taken money from her.
As to the events of the night of September 22, Whithacker stated that Thursday night being his night off, he had met Stella outside her office building to take her to the Metropol Hall mass meeting. “A cat poem had been taking shape in my mind for some time,” he explained. “It was important that I attend. Stella, of course, always looked forward to our Thursday nights together.”
They had walked crosstown, stopping in at an Eighth Avenue spaghetti house “owned by a cousin of Stella’s father. I discussed the Citizens’ Action Teams movement with Mr. Ferriquancchi and we were both surprised to find that the subject made Stella extremely nervous. Ignazio said we oughtn’t to go if Stella felt that way and I offered to go alone, but Stella said no, she wanted to go, at last somebody was doing something about the murders. She said she asked the Virgin Mother every night to keep everyone she knew safe.”
They had managed to get into Metropol Hall and had found downstairs seats well to the front of the auditorium.
“When the stampede started, Stella and I tried to hold on to each other, but the damn cattle tore us apart. The last I saw of her she was being carried off in a crowd of lunatics, screaming something at me. But I couldn’t hear. I never saw her alive again.”
Whithacker had been lucky, suffering no more than a torn pocket and some pummeling.
“I crowded with a few other people in a doorway across from the Hall to keep out of harm’s way. When the worst was over I started searching for Stella. I couldn’t find her among the dead or injured at the Hall so I began looking along Eighth Avenue, the side streets, Broadway. I wandered around all night.”
Whithacker was asked why he had not telephoned to the Petrucchis; the family had been up all night frantic over Stella’s failure to come home. They had not known about her appointment with him.
“That’s the reason. They didn’t know about me. Stella said it was better that way. She said they were strict Catholics and it would only cause a ruckus if they found out she was going around with a non-Catholic. She didn’t mind her father’s cousin Ignazio knowing about us, she said, because Mr. Ferriquancchi is anti-Papist and nobody in the Petrucchi family has anything to do with him anyway.”
At 7:30 A.M. Whithacker had returned to Metropol Hall for another checkup, intending to telephone the Petrucchis “despite their religious scruples” if this last effort to locate Stella failed.
At his first question he was seized by the police.
“I must have passed the entrance to that alley a dozen times during the night,” Howard Whithacker said. “But it was dark, and how was I to know Stella was laid out in there?”
Whithacker was held “for further questioning.”
“No,” Inspector Richard Queen told reporters, “we have absolutely nothing on him. But we want to check his story, and so on.” The “and so on” was taken by the press — correctly — to refer both to related matters in the recent past and to a certain interesting wildness of eye, manner, and speech in Stella Petrucchi’s friend.
There was no medical evidence of rape or attempted rape.
The girl’s purse was missing; but it was found later, its contents intact, in the debris of the Hall. A gold religious medal on a fine chain about her neck had not been touched.
The strangling cord was of the familiar tussah silk, dyed salmon-pink. It had been knotted at the nape exactly as in the previous cases. Laboratory examination of the cord turned up nothing of significance.
It seemed clear that Stella Petrucchi had taken refuge in the alley after being hurled into the street with the rest of the Metropol audience. But whether the Cat had been waiting for her in the alley, or had entered with her, or had followed her in, there was no way of telling.
The probability was that she had suspected nothing until the clutch of the silk. She might well have entered the alley at the Cat’s invitation, assuming he caught up with her and offered to “protect” her from harm at the hands of the mob.
As usual, he had left no trail.
It was past noon when Ellery pulled himself up the stairs to find the door of the Queen apartment unlocked. Wondering, he went in; and the first thing he saw on entering his bedroom was a torn nylon stocking dangling from the seat of his ladder back chair. Over one of the chair posts was hooked a white brassiere.
He bent over his bed and shook her.
Her eyes popped open.
“You’re all right.”
Celeste shuddered. “Don’t ever do that again! For a split century I thought it was the Cat.”
“Is Jimmy...?”
“Jimmy’s all right, too.”
Ellery found himself sitting on the edge of his bed; the back of his neck throbbed again. “I’ve often dreamed about this situation,” he said, rubbing it.
“What situation?” She stretched her long legs stiff under the sheet, moaning, “Oh, I ache.”
“I know,” said Ellery. “This all happened in a Peter Arno drawing.”
“What?” said Celeste sleepily. “Is it still today?”
Her black hair coursed over his pillow in sweet poetic streams. “But exhaustion,” Ellery explained, “is the enemy of poetry.”
“What? You look kind of dilapidated. Are you all right?”
“I will be once I get the hang of sleeping again.”
“I am sorry!” Celeste clutched the sheet to her and sat up quickly. “I wasn’t really awake. Er, I’m not... I mean, I didn’t want to poke around in your bureau...”
“You cad,” said a stern voice. “Would you boot out an unclothed maiden?”
“Jimmy!” said Celeste happily.
Jimmy McKell was in the bedroom doorway, one arm about a large, mysterious-looking paper sack.
“Well,” said Ellery. “The McKell. Indestructible, I see.”
“I see you made it, too, Ellery.”
They grinned at each other. Jimmy was wearing one of Ellery’s most cherished sports jackets, which was too small for him, and Ellery’s newest tie.
“Mine were torn clean off me,” explained Jimmy. “How you feeling, woman?”
“Like September Morn at an American Legion convention. Would you two step into the next room?”
In the living room Jimmy scowled. “You look beat, old-timer. What’s with the Petrucchi girl?”
“Oh, you know about that.”
“Heard it on your radio this morning.” Jimmy set the sack down.
“What’s in that bag?”
“Some hardtack and pemmican. Your larder’d run dry. Have you eaten anything, bud?”
“No.”
“Neither have we. Hey, Celeste!” Jimmy shouted. “Never mind making with the clothes. Rustle us some breakfast!”
Celeste laughed from Ellery’s bathroom.
“You two seem awfully gay,” remarked Ellery, feeling for the armchair.
“Funny how it hits you.” Jimmy laughed, too. “You get mixed up in something like last night’s fandango and all of a sudden everything drops into the slot. Even stupidity. I thought I’d seen everything in the Pacific, but I hadn’t. The war was murder, all right, but Organized. You wear a uniform and you carry a gun and you take great big orders and somebody cooks your chow and you kill or get killed, all according to the book. But last night... tooth and claw. Man stripped to the bloody bones. Disintegration of the tribe. Every fellow-cannibal your enemy. It’s good to be alive, that’s all.”