“Attacked from which direction?”
“From behind, same as Abernethy. And the cord knotted.”
“Oh, yes, there’s that.”
“What?”
“The cord was knotted in Abernethy’s case, too. It’s bothered me.”
“Why?” The Inspector sat up.
“Well... there’s a sort of finality about it.”
“A what?”
“Decorative, but was it necessary? You’d hardly let go till your victim was dead, would you? Then why the knot? In fact, it would be pretty hard to tie a knot while the victim was strangling. It suggests that the knots were tied after they were dead.”
His father was staring.
“It’s like putting a bow on a package that’s quite adequately wrapped. The extra — I almost said the artistic — touch. Neat, satisfying. Satisfying a... what would you say? a passion for completeness? finality? Yes, so damned final.”
“What in the world are you talking about?”
“I’m not sure,” said Ellery mournfully. “Tell me — was there a sign of forcible entry?”
“No. The general opinion is that she expected her killer. Like Abernethy.”
“Posing as a client?”
“Could be. If he was, it was only to get in. The bedroom wasn’t disturbed and while she was found wearing a wrapper, she had a slip and panties on underneath. The testimony is she nearly always wore a negligee when she was home. But it could have been anybody, Ellery. Someone she knew well or someone she didn’t know so well or even someone she didn’t know at all. It wasn’t hard,” said the Inspector, “to make Miss Smith’s acquaintance.”
“The other tenants—”
“Nobody heard a thing. The restaurant people didn’t even know she existed. You know how it is in New York.”
“Ask no questions and mind your own business.”
“While the lady upstairs is getting herself dead.”
The Inspector got up and fussed to a window. But immediately he returned to his chair, scowling. “In other words,” he said, “we drew a blank in the Smith case, too. Then—”
“Question. Did you find any connection between Abernethy and Violette Smith? Any at all?”
“No.”
“Go on.”
“Cometh Number 3,” said the Inspector in a sort of liturgical mutter. “Rian O’Reilly, 40-year-old shoe salesman, living with his wife and four kids in a Chelsea tenement. Date, July 18; twenty-six days after the Smith murder.
“O’Reilly’s kill,” the Inspector said, “was so damn... so damn discouraging. He was a hardworking fellow, good husband, crazy father, struggling to keep his head above water and having a tough time of it. To keep his family going O’Reilly held down two jobs, a full-timer in a lower Broadway shoe store, a night relief job in a shop on Fulton and Flatbush across the river in Brooklyn. He’d have managed to scrape along if he hadn’t run into such hard luck. One of his children got polio two years ago. Another got pneumonia. Then his wife splashed herself with hot paraffin putting up grape jelly and he paid a skin specialist for a year trying to heal her burn. On top of that another kid was run over by a hit-and-run driver who was never identified and spent three months in a hospital. O’Reilly’s borrowed the limit against his $1000 insurance policy. His wife had hocked her measly engagement ring. They’d had a ‘39 Chewy — O’Reilly sold it to pay doctors’ bills.
“O’Reilly liked his nip now and then, but he gave up drinking. Even beer. He held himself down to ten cigarettes a day, and he’d been a heavy smoker. His wife put up box lunches and he didn’t eat supper till he got home, usually after midnight. In the past year he’d suffered a lot from toothache, but he wouldn’t go to a dentist, said he didn’t have time for such foolishness. But he’d toss around some at night, his wife said.”
The heat flowed through their windows. Inspector Queen wiped his face with a ball of handkerchief.
“O’Reilly was no Saturday night Irishman. He was a little guy, thin and ugly, with heavy eyebrows that made him look worried even when he was dead. He used to tell his wife he was a physical coward, but she thought he’d had plenty of guts. I guess he did, at that. He was born in Hell’s Kitchen and his life was one long battle. With his drunk of a father and with the street hoodlums when he was a boy, and after that with poverty and sickness. Remembering his old man, who used to beat up his mother, O’Reilly tried to make up for it to his own wife and children. His whole life was his family.
“He was wild about classical music. He couldn’t read a note and he’d never had a lesson, but he could hum snatches of a lot of operas and symphonies and during the summer he tried to take in as many of the free Sunday concerts in Central Park as he could. He was always after his kids to tune in WQXR, used to say he thought Beethoven would do them a lot more good than The Shadow. One of his boys has a talent for the violin; O’Reilly finally had to stop his lessons. The night that happened, Mrs. O’Reilly said, he cried like a baby all night.
“This was the man,” said Inspector Queen, watching his curling toes, “whose strangled body was found early in the morning of July 19 by the janitor of the building. The janitor was mopping the entrance hall down when he noticed a heap of clothes in the dark space behind the stairway. It was O’Reilly, dead.
“Prouty fixed the time of death as between midnight and 1 A.M. of the 18th-19th. Obviously, O’Reilly was just coming home from his night job in Brooklyn. We checked with the store and the time he left jibed, sure enough, with his movements if he’d gone directly home and been attacked as he entered the house on the way upstairs. There was a lump on the side of his head—”
“The result of a blow, or from a fall,” asked Ellery.
“We’re not sure. A blow seems more likely, because he was dragged — there are rubberheel scrapes on the marble — from just inside the front door to the spot under the stairs where the janitor found him. No struggle, and nobody heard anything.” The Inspector pinched his nose so hard the tip remained whitish for a few seconds. “Mrs. O’Reilly had been up all night waiting for her husband, afraid to leave the kids alone in the apartment. She was just going to phone the police — they held on to their phone, she said, because O’Reilly always said suppose one of the kids got sick in the middle of the night? — when the cop the janitor’d called came up to give her the bad news.
“She told me she’d been scared and nervous ever since the Abernethy murder. ‘Rian had to come home from Brooklyn so late,’ she said. ‘I kept at him to quit the night job, and then when that woman on West 44th Street was choked to death too I nearly went out of my mind. But Rian only laughed. He said nobody’d bother to kill him, he wasn’t worth killing.”
Ellery planted his elbows on his naked knees and his face secretively between his hands.
The Inspector said, “Seems like it’s getting hotter,” and Ellery mumbled something. “It’s against nature,” complained the Inspector. He took off his shirt and undershirt and he plastered them with a smack against the back of his chair. “Leaving a widow and four children, with what was left of his insurance going to pay for his burial. I understand his priest is trying to do something, but it’s a poor parish and O’Reilly’s heirs are now enjoying City relief.”
“And now his kids will be listening to The Shadow if they can hang on to their radio.” Ellery rubbed his neck. “No clues.”
“No clues.”
“The cord.”
“Same silk, blue.”
“Knotted at the back?”
“Plenty of rhyme,” muttered Ellery. “But where’s the reason?”
“You tell O’Reilly’s widow.”
And Ellery was quiet. But after a while he said, “It was about that time that the cartoonist was inspired. I remember the unveiling of the Cat. He jumped out at you from the editorial page of the Extra... such as it was and is. One of the great monsters of cartoonical time. The man should get the Pulitzer prize for Satanism. A diabolical economy of line; the imagination fills in what the artist leaves out. Guaranteed to share your bed. How Many Tails Has the Cat? asks the caption. And we count three distinct appendages, curling at the ends back upon themselves. Not thick true tails, you understand. More like cords. Ending in nooselike openings just right for necks... which aren’t there. And one cord bears the number 1, and the second cord bears the number 2 and the third cord the number 3. No Abernethy, Smith, or O’Reilly. He was so right. The Cat is quantitative. It’s numbers that equalize all men, the Founding Fathers and Abe Lincoln to the contrary notwithstanding. The Cat is the great leveler of humanity. It’s no accident that his claws are shaped like sickles.”