Post display according to page

Ok I have been working on this all day and am haven’t gotten any where. I am trying to make a single template to display posts according to the page you are on. I know to use query_posts() but I seem to have problems with my php switch case.

<?php
$currenttitle=the_title_attribute("","",FALSE);
switch($currenttitle):
case "Private: A test":
$mycat=5;
break;
endswitch;
$args='cat='.$mycat.'&showposts=1';
query_posts($args);
if ( have_posts() ) while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

I got the title by doing an echo of $currenttitle and copy and pasted it in and it doesn’t want to work. If I manually set $currenttitle to “Private: A test” it works so what am I doing wrong? I have also used wp_title and took a substring from it and that didn’t work either. I would appreciate any help or suggestions.