“Sweet talk, but the point is the day after August 9 there was the Cat again,” said the Inspector, “and he’d grown a fourth tail.”
“And I remember that, too,” nodded Ellery.
“Monica McKell. August 9. Twenty-two days after O’Reilly.”
“The perennial debutante. A mere 37 and going strong.”
“Park and 53rd. Café society. A table jumper they got to call Leaping Lena.”
“Or in a more refined phrase of Lucius Beebe — Madcap Monica.”
“That’s the one,” said the Inspector. “Also known as McKell’s Folly, McKell being her old man, the oil millionaire, who told me Monica was the only wildcat he’d never brought in. But you could see he was proud of her. She was wild, all right — cut her teeth on a gin bottle, came out during Prohibition, and her favorite trick when she was tight was to get behind the bar and outmix the bartender. They say she mixed the best Martini in New York, drunk or sober. She was born in a penthouse and died in the subway. Downhill all the way.
“Monica never married. She once said that the only unrelated male she’d ever known that she could stand having around for any length of time was a horse named Leibowitz, and the only reason she didn’t marry him, she said, was that she doubted she could housebreak him. She was engaged a dozen times, but at the last minute she’d take a walk. Her father would yell, and her ma, who’s a handkerchief-twister, would get hysterics, but it was no deal. They had high hopes about Monica’s last engagement — it looked as if she was really going to marry this Hungarian count — but the Cat put a crimp in that.”
“In the subway,” said Ellery.
“Sure, how did she get there. Well, it was this way. Monica McKell was the biggest booster the New York subway system ever had. She’d ride it every chance she got. She told Elsa Maxwell it was the only place a girl could get the feel of the people. She took a particular delight in dragging her escorts there, especially when they were in tails.
“Funny,” said the Inspector, “that it should have been the subway that did her in. Monica was out clubbing that night with Snooky — her count — and a bunch of their friends. They wound up in some Village dive, and around a quarter of four in the morning Monica got tired tending bar and they decided to call it a night. They began piling into cabs — all except Monica, who stood her ground and argued that if they really believed in the American way they’d all go home in the subway. The others were game, but the count got his Hungarian up — he was also tanked on vodka-and-Cokes — and said something like if he wanted to smell peasants he’d have stayed in Hungary and he’d be damned if he’d lower himself, into the ground or any other way, and she could bloody well go home in the subway herself if she wanted to so bad. And she did.
“And she did,” said the Inspector, licking his lips, “and she was found a little after 6 A.M. lying on a bench near the tailpiece of the platform of the Sheridan Square station. A trackwalker found her. He called a cop and the cop took one look and went green. There was the salmon-colored silk cord around her neck.”
The Inspector got up and went into the kitchen and came back with the pitcher of lemonade. They drank in silence and then the Inspector put the pitcher back in the icebox.
When he returned, Ellery said with a frown, “Was there time for—?”
“No,” said the Inspector. “She’d been dead about two hours. That would place the murder attack at around 4 A.M. or a little later, just about time for her to have, walked over to Sheridan Square from the night club and maybe wait around a few minutes — you know how the trains run at that hour of the morning. But Count Szebo was with the others until at least 5:30. They all stopped in at an allnight hamburger place on Madison and 48th on their way uptown. Every minute of his time is accounted for well past the murder period. Anyway, what would the point have been? Old man McKell had contracted to settle a hot million on Szebo when the knot was tied — excuse me, that was a bad figure of speech. I mean the count would have strangled himself before he’d lay a finger to that valuable throat. He doesn’t have a Hungarian pretzel.
“In Monica McKell’s case,” said the Inspector, shaking his head, “we were able to trace her movements right up the entrance of the Sheridan Square station. A nighthawk cab spotted her about halfway to the station from the club, pulled up alongside. She was on foot, alone. But she laughed and said to the hack, ‘You’ve got me wrong, my friend. I’m a poor working girl and I’ve just got a dime to get home on,’ and she opened her gold mesh bag and showed him; there was nothing in it but a lipstick, a compact, and a dime, he said. And she marched off down the street, the hack said, the diamond bracelet on her arm sparkling under the street lights. Squinting along like a movie star, was the way he put it. Actually, she was wearing a gold lamé creation designed like a Hindu sari, with a jacket of white mink thrown over it.
“And another cab driver parked near the station saw her cross the Square and disappear down the steps. She was still on foot, still alone.
“There was no one on duty at the change booth at that hour. Presumably she put her dime in the turnstile and walked down the platform to the end bench. A few minutes later she was dead.
“Her jewelry, her bag, her jacket weren’t touched.
“We’ve found no evidence that anybody else was on the platform with her. The second cab driver picked up a fare right after he saw Monica go down the subway steps, and apparently he was the only one around. The Cat may have been waiting on the platform; the Cat may have followed Monica down from the street after ducking into doorways to avoid being seen by the two cab drivers; or the Cat may have got off at Sheridan Square from an uptown train and found her there — there’s nothing to tell. If she put up a battle, there’s no sign of it. If she screamed, no one heard it. And that was the end of Monica McKell — born in New York, died in New York. From penthouse to subway. Downhill all the way.”
After a long time Ellery said, “A girl like that must have been mixed up in a thousand pulp story plots. I’ve heard a lot of scandal...”
“I am now,” sighed his father, “the world’s foremost authority on the Mysteries of Monica. I can tell you, for instance, that she had a burn scar just under the left breast that she didn’t get from falling on a hot stove. I know just where she was, and with whom, in February of 1946 when she disappeared and her father had us and the FBI chasing our tails looking for her, and despite what the papers said at the time her kid brother Jimmy had nothing to do with it — he’d just got out of the Service and he was having his own troubles readjusting to civilian life. I know how Monica came to get the autographed photo of Legs Diamond that’s still hanging on her bedroom wall, and it’s not for the reason you’d think. I know why she was asked to leave Nassau the year Sir Harry Oakes was murdered, and who asked her. I even know something J. Parnell Thomas never found out — that she was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party between 1938 and 1941, when she quit to become a Christian Fronter for four months, and then jumped that to take a course in Yoga Breathing Exercises under a Hollywood swami named Lal Dhyana Jackson.