“I have a poor acquaintance with the progress — if that is the word — of aeronautics.”
“Could the entire leap through space — from a platform in Zurich to a street in Manhattan — have been accomplished in three and a half to four hours, Professor Seligmann?”
“Obviously not.”
“So I telephoned to you. Whereupon it came out that Edward Cazalis did not go from the convention hall to an airfield that night. Came but not as speculation but as fact. For you told me you had kept Cazalis up talking in your hotel room in Zürich all through that night until ‘long past dawn.’ Surely that would mean, at the very earliest, 6 A.M.? Let’s say 6 A.M., Professor, to please me; it must have been, of course, even later. 6 A.M. in Zurich on the 4th of June would be midnight in New York on June 3. Do you recall my giving you the date of the first Cat murder? The murder of the man named Abernethy?”
“Dates are a nuisance. And there were so many.”
“Exactly. There were so many, and it was so long ago. Well, according to our Medical Examiner’s report, Abernethy was strangled ‘around midnight’ of June 3. As I said, a matter of simple physics. Cazalis has demonstrated many talents, but the ability to be in two places thousands of miles apart at the same moment is not one of them.”
The old man exclaimed, “But, as you say, this is so basic! And your police, your prosecutors, have not perceived this physical impossibility?”
“There were nine murders and an attempted tenth. The time-stretch was almost exactly five months. Cazalis’s old obstetrical files, the strangling cords hidden in his psychiatric case history files, the circumstances of his capture, his detailed and voluntary confession — all these have created an over-whelming presumption of his guilt. The authorities may have slipped through overconfidence, or carelessness, or because they found that in the majority of the murders Cazalis could physically have committed the crimes. Remember, there is no direct evidence linking Cazalis with any of the murders; the people’s entire case must rest on that tenth attempt. Here the evidence is direct enough. Cazalis was captured while he was in the act of tightening the noose about the throat of the girl who was wearing Marilyn Soames’s borrowed coat. The noose of tussah silk. The Cat’s noose. Ergo, he’s the Cat. Why think of alibis?
“On the other hand, one would expect the defense attorneys to check everything. If they haven’t turned up Cazalis’s alibi, it’s because of the defendant himself; when I left New York, he was being extremely difficult. After attempting to get along without legal help altogether. And then there’s no reason why a lawyer, merely because he is a lawyer for the defense, should be immune to the general atmosphere of conviction about his client’s guilt.
“I suspect, however, a more insidious reason for the alibi’s remaining undiscovered, one that goes to the roots of the psychology which has operated in this case virtually from its outset. There has been a neurotic anxiety of epidemic proportions to catch the Cat, drive a stake through his heart, and forget the whole dreadful mass incubus. It’s infected the authorities, too. The Cat was a Doppelgänger, his nature so tenuously drawn that when the authorities actually laid their hands on a creature of flesh and blood who fitted the specifications...”
“If you instruct me whom to address, Mr. Queen,” rumbled old Seligmann, “I shall cable New York of my having detained Cazalis all night until past dawn of the 4th June in Zürich.”
“We’ll arrange for you to make a formal deposition. That, plus the evidence of Dr. Cazalis’s attendance throughout the Zürich convention and of his return passage to the United States, which can’t have begun earlier than June 4, will clear him.”
“They will be satisfied that, having been unable physically to murder the first one, Cazalis did not murder the others?”
“To argue the contrary would be infantile, Professor Seligmann. The crimes were characterized and accepted as the work of the same individual almost from the beginning. And with abundant reason. The source of the supply of victims’ names alone confirms it. The method used in selecting the specific victims from the source of supply confirms it. The identical technique of the strangulations confirms it. And so on. The strongest point of all is the use in all nine murders of the strangling cords of tussah silk — cords of East Indian origin, exotic, unusual, not readily procurable, and obviously from the same source.”
“And, of course, in a sequence of acts of violence of a psychotic nature showing common characteristics—”
“Yes. Multiple homicides of this kind are invariably what we call ‘lone wolf operations,’ acts of a single disturbed person. There won’t be any trouble on that score... Are you sure you wouldn’t like to rest now, Professor Seligmann? Frau Bauer said—”
The old man dismissed Frau Bauer with a scowl as he reached for a tobacco jar. “I begin to glimpse your destination, mein Herr. Nevertheless, take me by the hand. You have resolved one difficulty only to be confronted by another.
“Cazalis is not the Cat.
“Then who is?”
“The next question,” nodded Ellery.
He was silent for a moment.
“I answered it between heaven and earth, Professor,” he said at last with a smile, “in a state of all but suspended animation, so you’ll forgive me if I go slowly.
“To arrive at the answer we must examine Cazalis’s known acts in the light of what we’ve built up about his neurosis.
“Just what was it Cazalis did? His known activities in the Cat cases begin with the tenth victim. His very choice of 21-year-old Marilyn Soames as the tenth victim must have arisen from his application of the same selective technique employed by the Cat in hunting through Cazalis’s old obstetrical case cards — I used the technique myself and arrived at the same victim. Anyone of reasonable intelligence could have done it, then, who had access to both the facts of the preceding nine crimes and the files.
“Having employed the Cat’s method in selecting the next victim in the series, what did Cazalis then proceed to do?
“As it happened, Marilyn Soames works at home, she was extremely busy, and she didn’t regularly come out into the streets. The Cat’s first problem in each case must have been to become familiar with the face and figure of the victim he had marked for destruction. Had the real Cat, then, been working on Marilyn Soames he would have attempted to lure her from her home in order to be able to study her appearance. This was precisely what Cazalis did. By a subterfuge, he lured Marilyn Soames to a crowded public place where he could ‘study’ her in ‘safety.’
“For days and nights Cazalis scouted the girl’s neighborhood and reconnoitered the building where she lives. Just as the Cat would have done. Just as the Cat must have done in the previous cases.