“Yes, sir, I know everything there is to know about Leaping Lena, or Madcap Monica,” said the Inspector, “except how she came to be strangled by the Cat... I can tell you this, Ellery. If when the Cat walked up to her on that subway platform he said, ‘Excuse me, Miss McKell, I’m the Cat and I’m going to strangle you,’ she probably moved over on the bench and said, ‘How perfectly thrilling. Sit down and tell me more.’”
Ellery jumped up. He took a turn around the living room, busily, like a runner limbering up. Inspector Queen watched the sweat roll down his back.
“And that,” said the Inspector, “is where we’re hung up.”
“Nothing—?”
“Not a bastardly thing. I suppose,” the old man said angrily, “I can’t blame McKell Senior for offering $100,000 reward, but all it’s done is give the papers another angle to play up and flood us with a barrage of happy gas from ten thousand crackpots. And it hasn’t been any help having McKell’s high-priced prima donna dicks underfoot, either!”
“What about the current mouse?”
“Number 5?” The Inspector cracked his knuckles, clicking off integers in a bitter arithmetic. “Simone Phillips, 35, lived with a younger sister in a coldwater flat on East 102nd Street.” He grimaced. “This mouse couldn’t even rustle her own cheese. Simone’d had something wrong with her spine since childhood and she was paralyzed from the waist down. Spent most of her life in bed. What you might call a pushover.”
“Yes.” Ellery was sucking a piece of lemon and making a face. “Doesn’t seem cricket, somehow. Even from the Cat.”
“It happened last Friday night. August 19. Ten days after the McKell woman. Celeste — the younger sister — fixed Simone up, turned on the radio for her, and left for a neighborhood movie. Around 9 o’clock.”
“Pretty late?”
“She went for just the main feature. Celeste said Simone hated being left alone, but she simply had to get out once a week—”
“Oh, this was routine?”
“Yes. The sister went every Friday night — her only recreation, by the way. Simone was helpless and Celeste was the only one she had. Anyway, Celeste ‘got back a little after 11. She found the paralytic strangled. Salmon-colored silk cord tied around her neck.”
“The crippled woman could hardly have let anyone in. Weren’t there any signs—?”
“Celeste never locked the apartment door when she had to leave Simone. Simone was deathly afraid of gas leaks and fires, afraid she’d be caught helpless in bed sometime when her sister wasn’t there. Leaving the door unlocked eased her mind. For the same reason they had a phone, which they certainly couldn’t afford.”
“Last Friday night. Almost as hot as tonight,” mused Ellery. “In that district the people would all be congregated on the stoop, hanging out the windows. Do you mean to tell me no one saw anything?”
“There’s so much testimony to the effect that no stranger entered the building through the front entrance between 9 and 11 that I’m convinced the Cat got in through the rear. There’s a back door leading out to a court, and the court is accessible, from one of a half-dozen different directions, the backs of the other houses and the two side streets; it runs right through. The Phillips flat is on the ground floor, rear. The hall is dark, has only a 25-watt light. That’s the way he got in, all right, and out again. But we’ve been over the square block a dozen times, inside the buildings and out, and we haven’t turned up a thing.”
“No screams.”
“If she did yell, nobody paid any attention to it. You know what a tenement district’s like on a hot night — kids out on the street till all hours and screams a dime a dozen. But my hunch is she didn’t make a sound. I’ve never seen such fright on a human face. Paralysis on top of paralysis. She didn’t put up the scrawniest kind of scrap. Wouldn’t surprise me if she just sat there with her mouth open, pop-eyed, while the Cat took his cord out and tied it around her neck and pulled it tight. Yes, sir, this was his easiest strike.”
The Inspector pulled himself to his feet. “Simone was very fat, from the waist up. The kind of fat that gives you the feeling that if you poked it you’d go clear through to the other side. As if she had no bones, no muscle.”
“Musculus,” said Ellery, sucking the lemon. “Little mouse. The shrunken little mice to the mouse. Little atrophies.”
“Well, she’d been parked in that bed over twenty-five years.” The old man trudged to one of the windows. “Sure is a scorcher.”
“Simone, Celeste.”
“What?” said the Inspector.
“Their names. So Gallic. Maternal poetry? And if not, how come ‘Phillips’?”
“Their father was French. The family name was originally Phillippe, but he Anglicized it when he came to America.”
“Mother French, too?”
“I think so, but they were married in New York. Phillips was in the import-export business and he made a fortune during the First World War. He dropped it all in the ’29 crash and blew his brains out, leaving Mrs. Phillips penniless.”
“With a paralyzed child. Tough.”
“Mrs. Phillips managed by taking in sewing. They made out fine, Celeste says — in fact, she was enrolled as a freshman in N.Y.U. downtown when Mrs. Phillips died of pleurisy-pneumonia. That was five years ago.”
“Must have been even tougher. For Celeste.”
“It couldn’t have been a peach parfait. Simone needed constant attention. Celeste had to quit school.”
“How’d she manage?”
“Celeste has a modeling job in a dress shop her mother did business with. Afternoons and all day Saturday. She has a beautiful figure, dark coloring — pretty goodlooking number. She could make a lot more somewhere else, she told me, but the store isn’t far from their home and she couldn’t leave Simone alone too long. I got the impression Celeste was pretty much dominated by Simone and this was confirmed by the neighbors. They told me Simone nagged at Celeste all the time, whining and complaining and making the younger sister, who they all think is a saint, run her legs off. Probably accounts for her beat-up look; she really was dragging her chin when I saw her.”
“Tell me,” said Ellery. “On Friday night last did this saintly young character go to the movies alone?”
“Yes.”
“Does she usually?”
The Inspector looked surprised. “I don’t know.”
“Might pay to find out.” Ellery leaned far forward to smooth out a wrinkle in the rug. “Doesn’t she have a boy friend?”
“I don’t think so. I gather she hasn’t had much opportunity to meet men.”
“How old is this Celeste?”
“23.”
“Ripe young age. — The cord was tussah silk?”
“Yes.”
The rug was now smooth.
“And that’s all you have to tell me?”
“Oh, there’s lots more, especially about Abernethy, Violette Smith, and Monica McKell.”
“What?”
“I’ll be happy to open the files to you.”
Ellery was silent.
“Want to go over them?” asked his father.
“You found no connection among any of the five victims.”
“Not a particle.”
“None of them knew any of the others.”