“While he was apparently on the prowl, Cazalis exhibited eagerness, cunning, disappointment of an extravagant nature at temporary frustrations. The kind of behavior one would have expected the unbalanced Cat to evince.
“Finally, on that climactic, October night, Cazalis waylaid a girl who resembled Marilyn Soames in height and figure and who was accidentally wearing Marilyn Soames’s coat, dragged this girl into an alley, and began to strangle her with one of the tussah silk cords associated with the Cat’s previous homicidal activities.
“And when we captured him Cazalis ‘confessed’ to being the Cat and reconstructed his ‘activities’ in the nine previous murders... including an account of the murder of Abernethy, committed when Cazalis was in Switzerland!
“Why?
“Why did Cazalis imitate the Cat?
“Why did he confess to the Cat’s crimes?”
The old man was listening intently.
“This was patently not the case of a deluded man’s identifying himself with the violent acts of another by merely claiming, as many psychotics did in those five months — every sensational crime brings people forward — to have committed the Cat’s crimes of record. No. Cazalis proved he was the Cat by thought, plan, and action; by creating a new and typical Cat crime based upon exact knowledge and a clearly painstaking study of the Cat’s habits, methods, and technique. This was not even imitation; it was a brilliant interpretation, consisting of omissions as well as of commissions. For example, on the morning when Cazalis actually entered the Soames apartment house, while he was out in the court, Marilyn Soames came downstairs to the vestibule and stood there for several minutes looking over her mail. At this moment Cazalis re-entered the hall. No one was apparently about except Cazalis and his victim; it was early morning, the street beyond was deserted. Nevertheless, at that time Cazalis made no move to attack the girl. Why? Because to have done so would have broken the consistent pattern of the Cat’s murders; those had been committed, to the last one, after dark — and this broad daylight. Such scrupulous attention to detail could not conceivably have come out of an ordinary psychotic identification. Not to mention the self-restraint exhibited.
“No, Cazalis was rational and his deliberate assumption of the Cat’s role in all its creative vigor was therefore rationally motivated.”
“It is your conclusion, then,” asked Seligmann, “that Cazalis had no intention of strangling the girl to death in the alley? That he merely made the pretense?”
“Yes.”
“But this would presuppose that he knew he was being followed by the police and that he would be captured in the act.”
“Of course he knew, Professor. The very fact that he, a rational man, set out to prove he was the Cat when he was not raises the logical question: Prove it to whom? His proof did not consist merely of a confession, as I’ve pointed out. It consisted of elaborate activities stretching over a period of many days; of facial expressions as well as of visits to the Soames neighborhood. A deception presupposes that there is someone watching to be deceived. Yes, Cazalis knew he was being followed by the police; he knew that each move he made, each twist of his lips, was being noted and recorded by trained operatives.
“And when he slipped the silk cord around Celeste Phillips’s neck — the girl he mistook for his victim — Cazalis was playing the final scene for his audience. It’s significant that the tenth case was the only case in which the intended victim was able to cry out loudly enough to be heard. And while Cazalis tightened the cord sufficiently to leave realistic marks on the girl’s neck, it’s also significant that he permitted her to get her hands between the noose and her throat, that he did not knock her unconscious as the Cat had done in at least two of his assaults, and that Celeste Phillips was able within a short time of the attack to speak and act normally; what slight and temporary damage she sustained was chiefly the result of her own struggles and her terror. What Cazalis would have done had we not run into the alley to ‘stop’ him is conjectural; probably he would have permitted the girl to scream long enough without fatal injury to insure interference from some outside source. He could be certain detectives weren’t far away in the fog, and it was a congested section of the City.
“He wanted to be caught in the act of a Cat murder-attempt, he planned to be caught in the act of a Cat murder-attempt, and he was successful in being caught in the act of a Cat murder-attempt.”
“Whereupon it becomes evident,” murmured the old man, “that we approach our destination.”
“Yes. For a rational man to assume another’s guilt and to be willing to suffer another’s punishment, the rational mind can find only one justification: the one is shielding the other.
“Cazalis was concealing the Cat’s identity.
“Cazalis was protecting the Cat from detection, exposure, and punishment.
“And in doing so Cazalis was punishing himself out of deeply buried feelings of his own guilts as they centered about the Cat and his emotional involvement with the Cat.
“Do you agree, Professor Seligmann?”
But the old man said in a curious way: “I am only an observer along this road you travel, Mr. Queen. I neither agree nor disagree; I listen.”
Ellery laughed. “What did I now know about the Cat?
“That the Cat was someone with whom Cazalis was emotionally involved. With whom he was therefore in a close relationship.
“That the Cat was someone whom Cazalis had an overpowering wish to protect and whose criminal guilt is tied in Cazalis’s mind to his own neurotic guilts.
“That the Cat was a psychotic with a determinable psychotic reason for seeking out and murdering people who a generation and more before had been brought into the world by Cazalis the obstetrician.
“That, finally, the Cat was someone who has had equal access with Cazalis to his old obstetrical records, which have been stored in a locked closet in his home.”
Seligmann paused in the act of putting the meerschaum back into his mouth.
“Is there such a person, I asked myself? To my certain knowledge?
“There is. To my certain knowledge,” said Ellery. “Just one.
“Mrs. Cazalis.”
“For Mrs. Cazalis,” said Ellery, “is the only living person who fits the specifications I have just drawn.
“Mrs. Cazalis is the only living person with whom Cazalis is emotionally involved in a close relationship; in his closest relationship.
“Mrs. Cazalis is the only living person whom Cazalis would have a compulsion to protect and for whose guilt Cazalis would feel intensely responsible... whose criminal guilt would be tied in his mind to his own neurotic guilt feelings.
“Mrs. Cazalis has a determinable — the only determinable — psychotic reason for seeking out and murdering people her husband had brought into the world.
“And that Mrs. Cazalis has had equal access with her husband to his obstetrical records is self-evident.”
Seligmann did not change expression. He seemed neither surprised nor impressed. “I am chiefly interested in pursuing your third point. What you have called Mrs. Cazalis’s ‘determinable psychotic reason’ for murdering. How do you demonstrate this?”
“By another extension of that method of mine you’ve characterized as unknown to science, Herr Professor. I knew that Mrs. Cazalis had lost two children in giving birth. I knew, from something Cazalis told me, that after the second delivery she was no longer able to bear children. I knew that she had thereafter become extremely attached to her sister’s only child, Lenore Richardson, to the point where her niece was more her daughter than her sister’s. I knew, or I had convinced myself, that Cazalis had proved inadequate to his sexual function as a husband. Certainly during the long period of his breakdowns and subsequent treatment he must have been a source of continual frustration to his wife. And she was only 19 when they married.