“Five murders and the biggest city in the world gets the shakes! Why? How do you explain it?”
Ellery was silent.
“Come on,” said the Inspector sarcastically. “You won’t endanger your amateur standing.”
But Ellery was only thinking. “Maybe,” he said, “maybe it’s the strange feel of it. New York will take fifty polio cases a day in its stride, but let two cases of Asiatic cholera break out and under the right conditions you might have mass hysteria. There’s something alien about these stranglings. They make indifference impossible. When a man like Abernethy can get it, anyone can get it.” He stopped. The Inspector was staring at him. “You seem to know a lot about it.”
“Just what I’ve happened to catch in the papers.”
“Like to know more? Worm’s eye view?”
“Well...”
“Sit down, son.”
“Dad—”
“Sit down!”
Ellery sat down. After all, the man was his father.
“Five murders so far,” said the Inspector. “All in Manhattan. All stranglings. Same kind of cord used in each.”
“That tussah silk number? Indian silk?”
“Oh, you know that.”
“The papers say you’ve got nowhere trying to trace them.”
“The papers are correct. It’s a strong, coarse-fibered silk of — so help me — Indian jungle origin, and it’s the only clue we have.
“What?”
“I repeat: not a single cursed other clue. Nothing! Nothing, Ellery. No prints. No witnesses. No suspects. No motives. There isn’t a thing to work on. The killer comes and goes like a breeze, leaving only two things behind, a corpse and a cord. The first victim was—”
“Abernethy, Archibald Dudley. Aged 44. Three-room apartment on East 19th Street near Gramercy Park. A bachelor left alone by the death of his invalid mother a few years ago. His father, a clergyman, died in 1922. Abernethy never worked a lick in his life. Took care of mama and afterward of himself. 4-F in the war. Did his own cooking, housekeeping. No apparent interests. No entangling alliances. No anything. A colorless, juiceless nonentity. Has the time of Abernethy’s death been fixed more accurately?”
“Doc Prouty is pretty well satisfied he was strangled around midnight of June 3. We have reason to believe Abernethy knew the killer; the whole setup smacked of an appointment. We’ve eliminated relatives; they’re scattered to hell and gone and none of them could have done it. Friends? Abernethy didn’t have any, not one. He was the original lone wolf.”
“Or sheep.”
“As far as I can see, we didn’t miss a trick,” said the Inspector morosely. “We checked the super of the building. We checked a drunk janitor. Every tenant in the house. Even the renting agent.”
“I understand Abernethy lived off the income from a trust—”
“Handled by a bank for umpty years. He had no lawyer. He had no business — how he occupied his time since his mother’s death God only knows; we don’t. Just vegetated, I guess.”
“Tradesmen?”
“All checked off.”
“Barber, too?”
“You mean from the killer’s getting behind his sweet petit point chair?” The Inspector did not smile. “He shaved himself. Once a month he got a haircut in a shop off Union Square. He’d gone there for over twenty years and they didn’t even know his name. Just the same we checked the three barbers. And no dice.”
“You’re convinced there was no woman in Abernethy’s life?”
“Positive.”
“And no man?”
“No evidence that he was even a homo. He was a small fat skunk egg. No hits, no runs, no errors.”
“One error. At least one.” Inspector Queen started, but then his lips tightened. Ellery sloshed a little in his chair. “No man can be the total blank the facts make out Abernethy to have been. It’s just not possible. And the proof that it’s not is that he was murdered. He had a feeble life of some sort. He did something. All five of them did. What about Violette Smith?”
“Violette Smith,” said the Inspector, closing his eyes. “Number 2 on the Cat’s hit parade. Strangled just nineteen days after Abernethy — date, June 22, sometime between 6 P.M. and midnight. Unmarried. 42. Lived alone in a two-room apartment on the top floor of a bug trap on West 44th, over a pizzeria. Side entrance, walkup. Three other tenants in the building besides the restaurant downstairs. Had lived at that address six years. Before that on 73rd and West End Avenue. Before that on Cherry Street in the Village, where she’d been born.
“Violette Smith,” said the Inspector without opening his eyes, “was the opposite of Archie Abernethy in just about every conceivable way. He was a hermit, she knew everybody around Times Square. He was a babe in the woods, she was a she-wolf. He’d been protected by mama all his life, the only protection she knew was the kind she had to pay. Abernethy had no vices, Violette had no virtues. She was a dipso, a reefer addict, and she’d just graduated to the hard stuff when she got hers. He never earned a penny in his life, she made her living the hard way.”
“Sixth Avenue mostly, I gather,” said Ellery.
“Not true. Violette never worked the pavements. Her hustling was on call; she had a mighty busy phone.
“Whereas in Abernethy’s case,” the Inspector droned on, “we had nothing to work on, in Violette’s we hit the jackpot. Normally, when a woman like her gets knocked off, you check the agent, the girl friends, the clients, the dope peddler, the mobster who’s always in the background somewhere — and somewhere along the line you hit the answer. Well, this setup was normal enough; Vi had a record of nine arrests, she’d done some time, she was tied up with Frank Pompo, all the rest of it. Only nothing got anywhere.”
“Are you sure—”
“—it was a Cat job? As a matter of fact, at first we weren’t. If not for the use of the cord—”
“Same Indian silk.”
“The color was different. Pinkish, a salmony kind of color. But the silk was that tussah stuff, all right, same as in Abernethy’s case, only his was blue. Of course, when the third one came along, and the fourth and fifth, the pattern was clear and we’re sure now the Smith woman was one of the series. The more we dig in the surer we get. The picture, atmosphere, are the same. A killer who came and went and didn’t even leave a shadow on a windowshade.”
“Still—”
But the old man was shaking his head. “We’ve worked the vine overtime. If Violette was slated to go we’d get some hint of it. But the stools don’t know a thing. It’s not that they’ve clammed up; they just don’t know.
“She wasn’t in any trouble. This definitely wasn’t a crackdown for holding out, or anything like that. Vi was in the racket for a living and she was smart enough to play ball without a squawk. She took shakedowns as part of the hazards of the business. She was well-liked, one of the old reliables.”
“Over 40,” said Ellery. “In a wearing profession. I don’t suppose—”
“Suicide? Impossible.”
Ellery scratched his nose. “Tell me more.”
“She wasn’t found for over thirty-six hours. On the morning of June 24 a girl friend of hers who’d been trying to reach her by phone a whole day and night climbed the stairs, found Violette’s door shut but not locked, went in—”
“Abernethy’s body was found seated in an easy-chair,” said Ellery. “Exactly how was the Smith woman found?”
“Her flat was a bedroom and sitting room — kitchenette was one of those wall-unit jobs. She was found on the floor in the doorway between the two rooms.”
“Facing which way?” asked Ellery quickly.
“I know, I know, but there was no way of telling. She was all bunched up. Might have fallen from any position.”