“I find,” said Jimmy McKell, “I find nothing to indicate that the Cazalises have been anything but happily married — in case you’re interested. No whisper about him, in spite of all the ladies in his medical life, and for Mrs. Cazalis there’s never been any man but her husband.
“They ran into hard luck, though. In 1927 Mrs. Cazalis had her first baby and early in 1930 her second—”
“And lost both in the delivery room,” nodded Ellery. “Cazalis mentioned that the night I met him.”
“He felt terrible about it, I’m told. He’d taken fanatical care of his wife during both pregnancies and he’d done the deliveries himself — what’s the matter?”
“Cazalis was his wife’s obstetrician?”
“Yes.” Jimmy looked at them both. Inspector Queen was now at the window, pulling at his fingers behind his back.
“Isn’t that unethical?” asked the Inspector casually. “A doctor delivering his own wife?”
“Hell, no. Most doctors don’t do it because they’re emotionally involved with the woman in labor. They doubt their ability to maintain — where’s that note? — to maintain ‘the necessary objective, detached professional attitude.’ But many doctors do, and Dr. Edward Cazalis of the Tearing Twenties was one of them.”
“After all,” said the Inspector to Ellery, as if Ellery were arguing the point, “he was a big man in his field.”
“The type man,” said Jimmy, “so supremely egocentric he’d maybe become a psychiatrist. Hm?”
“I don’t think that’s quite fair to psychiatrists,” laughed Ellery. “Any data on the two babies he lost?”
“All I know about it is that both babies were toughies and that after the second Mrs. Cazalis couldn’t have any more children. I gathered that they were both breeches.”
“Go on.”
The Inspector came back and sat down with his bottle.
“In the year 1930, a few months after they lost their second child, we find Cazalis having a breakdown.”
“Breakdown,” said Ellery.
“Breakdown?” said the Inspector.
“Yes. He’d been driving himself, he was 48 — his collapse was attributed to overwork. By this time he’d been practicing obstetrical and gynecological medicine for over twenty-five years, he was a wealthy man, so he gave up his practice and Mrs. Cazalis took him traveling. They went on a world cruise — you know the kind, through the Canal up to Seattle, then across the Pacific — and by the time they reached Europe Cazalis was practically well again. Only, he wasn’t. While they were in Vienna — this was early in ’31 — he had a setback.”
“Setback?” said Ellery sharply. “You mean another breakdown?”
“‘Setback’ was the word. It was nerves again, or mental depression or something. Anyway, being in Vienna, he went to see Béla Seligmann and—”
“Who’s Béla Seligmann?” demanded Inspector Queen.
“Who’s Béla Seligmann, he says. Why, Béla Seligmann is—”
“There was Freud,” said Ellery, “and there’s Jung, and there’s Seligmann. Like Jung, the old boy hangs on.”
“Yes, he’s still around. Seligmann got out of Austria just in time to observe Anschluss from an honored bleacher seat in London, but he went back to Vienna after the little cremation ceremony in the Berlin Chancellery and I believe he’s still there. He’s over 80 now, but in 1931 he was at the height of his powers. Well, it seems Seligmann took a great interest in Cazalis, because he snapped him out of whatever was wrong with him and aroused in the guy an ambition to become a psychiatrist.”
“He studied with Seligmann?”
“For four years — one under par, I’m told. Cazalis spent some time in Zürich, too, and then in 1935 the Cazalises returned to the States. He put in over a year getting hospital experience and early in 1937 — let’s see, that would have made him 55 — he set himself up in the practice of psychiatry in New York. The rest is history.” Jimmy laced his nagging glass.
“That’s all you got, Jimmy?”
“Yes. No.” Jimmy referred hastily to his last envelope. “There’s one other item of interest. About a year ago — last October — Cazalis broke down again.”
“Broke down?”
“Now don’t go asking me for clinical details. I don’t have access to medical records. Maybe it was plain pooping out from overwork — he has a racehorse’s energy and he’s never spared himself. And, of course, he was 66. It wasn’t much of a breakdown but it must have scared him, because he started to whittle down his practice. I understand he hasn’t taken a new case in a year. He’s polishing off the patients under treatment and transferring long-termers to other men when he can. I’m told that within a short time he’ll be retiring.” Jimmy tossed his collection of disreputable envelopes on the table. “End of report.”
The envelopes lay there.
“Thanks, Jimmy,” said Ellery in a curiously final voice.
“Is it what you wanted?”
“What I wanted?”
“Well, expected.”
Ellery said carefully, “It’s a very interesting report.”
Jimmy set his glass down. “I take it you shamans want to be alone.”
Neither man replied.
“Never let it be said,” said Jimmy, picking up his hat, “that a McKell, couldn’t recognize a brush.”
“Fine job, McKell, just fine,” said the Inspector. “Night.”
“Keep in touch with me, Jimmy.”
“Mind if I drift in with Celeste tomorrow night?”
“Not in the least.”
“Thanks! Oh.” Jimmy paused in the foyer. “There’s one little thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Let me know when you clap him in irons, will you?”
When the door closed Ellery sprang to his feet.
His father poured another drink. “Here, have one.”
But Ellery mumbled, “That touch of so-called shell shock in the first war. Those recurring breakdowns. And in the middle age the obvious attempt to compensate for something in that sudden, apparently unprepared-for interest in psychiatry. It fits, it fits.”
“Drink it,” said his father.
“Then there’s the whole egocentric pattern. It’s unusual for a man of 50 to begin studying psychiatry, to set up in practice at 55, and to make a success of it to boot. His drive must be gigantic.
“Look at his early history. A man who set out to prove something to — whom? himself? society? And who wouldn’t let anything stand in his way. Who used every tool that came to hand and tossed it aside when it outlived its immediate usefulness. Professionally ethical always, but in the narrowest sense: I’m sure of it. And then marriage to a girl less than half his age — and not just any girl; it had to be a Merigrew of Maine.
“And those two tragic confinements, and... guilt. Guilt, decidedly: immediately that first breakdown. Overwork, yes; but not his body. His conscience.”
“Aren’t you doing an awful lot of guessing?” asked Inspector Queen.
“We’re not dealing with clues you can put on a slide. I wish I knew more!”
“You’re spilling it, son.”
“The conflicts set in, and from then on it’s a question of time. A gradual spreading of the warp. A sickening, a corruption of the whole psychic process — whatever the damned mechanism is. Somewhere along the line a personality that was merely paranoid in potential crossed over and became paranoid in fact. I wonder...”