The Clue of the Judas Tree

by Zenith Brown

  “Now take Number Two. If Spur did it, and is tryin’ to get out of it by play-actin’, then my idea when I came down here is all wrong. And I got to find a motive that fits h’vm. But if you take Number Three, then my idea’s all right. And if Number Three’s right, then I got to find a motive that’ll fit: one, Agnes Hutton; two, Major Ellicott; three, Archer; four, Dr. Sartoris; or five, the old woman.”

  “Are you being mysterious, or have you got a reason for keeping your swell idea to yourself?” I asked.

  He grinned.

  “I’ll just hang onto it for a while,” he said blandly, getting up. “Mind you don’t say nothing about it. We’ll, I got work to do.”

  He looked at his watch.

  “I’ll be seein’ you, lady. Can you get them notes typed out for me?”

  When I was sitting a little later on a stool in front of my typewriter, I got to wondering about the things I hadn’t told Lieutenant Kelly, and wondering what sort of theory Dr. Sartoris would trot out of the psychoanalytic paddock to fit my omissions. I counted them up. First, I hadn’t told him about Cheryl and Michael and the spear. Not that that proved anything, but it certainly added more brick to the wall that Lieutenant Kelly was building around Michael Spur. The meaning of the telegrams from the West was plain enough.

  Second, I hadn’t told him about the telegram that dropped out of Dr. Sartoris’s pocket on the train. Third, that Dr. Sartoris had subsequently denied knowledge of Michael’s return. Fourth, that Mrs. Trent had pretended she hadn’t been waiting for him all day. Fifth, that Mrs. Trent was planning to buy the Foster place for Dr. Sartoris.

  In fact, as I thought about it, it seemed to me very much as if I’d done my best to shield a man who I was convinced was a pretty detestable sort of person. I hadn’t even the satisfaction of being able to tell myself I’d done it to protect a silly old woman from the consequences of her own folly.

  I was finishing Michael’s statement, and had put another sheet of paper in my typewriter, when I heard a commotion outside. I went over to my window and looked out.

  Lieutenant Kelly was standing on the far side of the bed of tulips. But it wasn’t really a bed of tulips any longer. There were three men down there, armed with spades, and they were digging it up, systematically. I looked on, perfectly horrified, at the wanton destruction. Suddenly one of the men shouted, and they all dropped their spades and watched, while he bent over and picked something up out of the hole he’d made in the bed. Fie held it out to Lieutenant Kelly. It was covered with moist soil, but I could see that it was a revolver.

  It seemed, I learned later on, that the business of finding the gun buried in the tulip bed was a simple piece of two-plus-two logic on Lieutenant Kelly’s part. The blood on my window ledge indicated that somebody who’d been in contact with the murdered man had been there. There was no evidence on the tile trimming outside that anyone had gone out my window; there must have been some other point, then, in the blood there. Lieutenant Kelly had concluded also that odd and casual as Perry Bassett was, he wasn’t enough so to spend the morning weeding in the garden, at that particular spot, while his brother-in-law was lying in the welter of his own drying blood in the library a hundred feet away.

  Personally I should have said Perry Bassett was remote enough from life to do almost anything, but in this instance Lieutenant Kelly was right, when he had concluded that Perry or somebody had thrown something from my window down into the tulip bed and Perry had buried it there.

  He wrapped the gun up and sent it to Baltimore by a state policeman, and poor Perry Bassett was summoned into the dining room.

  I went to see Cheryl and told her as much as I’d seen from my window—that the gun had been found in the tulip bed and that Sergeant Lynch had been sent to bring Perry for examination. She was sitting crosslegged on the floor taping a tennis racket when I came in, and didn’t seem in the least perturbed by the news,

  “What on earth do you suppose the silly did that for?” she asked, in a slightly puzzled tone.

  “I suppose he really had to find the gun,” I suggested ironically.

  “No, I mean Perry,” she said seriously. “Why did he put it there, of all places? “

  For a moment I had a sneaking feeling that Cheryl was in some respects her mother’s daughter after all.

  “You see, you don’t know Perry,” she went on, as if she’d guessed part of what I was thinking. “He’s very curious, and if he hid it there, he must have had something in mind. Don’t make the mistake that Perry had anything to do with it,” she added. “He couldn’t hurt anything. There’s a family of jack-rabbits that eat all the vegetables he grows every year, and we have to get other vegetables from the next farm, because he won’t have them killed.”

  I was forced to admit there was something very fine in Cheryl’s conviction, in the face of obvious evidence, that the people she liked couldn’t do things she didn’t like. So I said, “Well, I hope Lieutenant Kelly sees it that way.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Oddly enough, it seemed that Lieutenant Kelly did see it exactly that way. At least, that’s the impression he gave Perry. I ran into Perry when I went downstairs a little early to read the papers before dinner. He was sitting on the terrace outside the open windows of the living room, his back turned on the ravished remains of his tulip bed. He had a big leather-bound seed catalogue on his knees, and he was staring sadly at it. So far as I know it was his only form of literary indulgence. At least it was the only thing I ever saw him read, just as the Co?ites Drolatiques that Agnes Hutton carried about was the only book I ever saw her with. The seed catalogue was opened at a spread of gorgeous deep-hued peonies, the sort that are never seen on land or sea or anywhere except in seed catalogues. He looked around like a startled rabbit when he heard me coming. Then he smiled nervously and cleared his throat.

  “I made a mistake,” he said simply.

  “You did?” I said. “How?”

  “Well, that man in there (which was the only way he ever referred to Lieutenant Kelly) says I was foolish to try to hide the gun, because it began to look like my brother-in-law killed himself. The gun was right by his hand, and he said the shot was fired very close, so it could have been, you see.”

  “Why did you hide it?” I asked.

  “Oh,” he said meekly, “I guess I lost my head. “You see, I heard the shot. I went downstairs, and you were already there, in front of me. Of course, I knew what had happened, and I didn’t want the police to get the gun, with Michael’s fingerprints on it. I turned out the light.”

  He looked timidly at me and blinked guiltily.

  “I guess I scared you?”

  “I guess you did too,” I said.

  “Then you ran through the library, and Í got the gun in the dark, and that’s how I got the blood all over me. Anyway, while you were getting back through the back staircase, I got upstairs. Your door was open, and I had the gun, so I just dived in and threw it out the window and got back to my room just as you came up.”

  I was a little startled.

  “Who blew out the fuse, then?” I demanded.

  He glanced around cautiously, and beckoned me closer.

  “That’s the funny thing,” he said. “Somebody was in the library between the time you and I left and the time Dick Ellicott and I went down.”

  “Who do you think it was? “

  “That’s what that man in there asked me, but I don’t know. All I know is that it was me that turned out the light and me that got the gun. I’m sorry I did, because if Mr. Doyle could think it was suicide everything would have been all right.”

  I was a little disappointed in his attitude, because Mr. Trent had seemed rather fond of him.

  “Aren’t you a little sorry Mr. Trent’s dead?” I said.

  “Oh, yes. I am sorry in some ways,” he said frankly. “He let me stay here after I lost all my money, but he wasn’t constructive. I mean he wouldn’t do anything to really get me started again. You know
”—he glanced over his shoulder again, and lowered his voice, which was already in the stage-whisper class—“I’ll tell you all about it sometime. If I had ten thousand dollars right now, or next week even, I could clean up on Wall Street. There’s absolutely not a chance to lose.”

  He shook his head sadly.

  “But Duncan wouldn’t help me out. Then he was cross to my sister lots of times. But Emily is a little foolish. You haven’t noticed it so soon, but she does very odd things for a woman of her age. You know, flowers don’t ever get as big as the ones they have pictures of.”

  I glanced around. No one was in sight, but a minute later Dr. Sartoris appeared in the window and came outside. Magothy followed with a tray of cocktails. He had a large black crêpe heart sewed to the sleeve of his white coat.

  Dr. Sartoris said “Good evening” and sat down. I don’t know whether he knew about the revolver or not. He asked quite casually if the police had dug up the tulip bed. Perry looked around and winced at the sight, and I said yes, they had.

  “I hear there’s a possibility of suicide,” he said. “In fact Mr. Doyle telephoned Mrs. Trent and said they were discussing it. Have you seen Lieutenant Kelly since then?”

  I hadn’t seen him since I’d looked out of my window and seen him directing the tulip bed operations. I did, however, know that he’d spent some time in the library with Mr. Archer and Agnes Hutton and Major Ellicott. I knew also that he had run into town and brought Mr. Doyle out to Ivy Hill. The two of them had talked with Mr. Archer and Agnes, and Mr. Doyle had gone back to town.

  At 7:30, while we were sitting out on the terrace still, Magothy came out to announce dinner, and said that Mr. Archer and Agnes would not be with us; they were still in the library with Lieutenant Kelly. Later we heard that Kelly had gone to Baltimore. Everybody seemed to breathe a little easier. Agnes and Mr. Archer joined us, Cheryl came down with her mother. Mrs. Trent was dressed in a flowing black lace Lanvin with long skintight sleeves and no back to speak of. The change in her was positively startling. She ignored Mr. Archer and Major Ellicott with the aplomb of a Hollywood duchess, and leaned on Dr. Sartoris, mentally and physically, with the coyness of a Broadway ingénue with a Park Avenue apartment.

  It was Victor this, and Victor that, and Victor will you ask Magothy to turn off the radio, when Major Ellicott was reading the paper within two feet of it. She made no allusion to Mr. Doyle’s suicide theory. In fact, outside of a sort of subdued languor, there was not the slightest reason to think she was not a very contented woman. When she and Dr. Sartoris strolled out into the moonlight—it was Mrs. Trent’s idea, she hadn’t had a breath of air all day—there was a positive collapse in the atmosphere. Mr. Archer bid two spades with me holding three honors and two outside aces. As I was his partner we lost only two on our seven bid. Major Ellicott threw his paper on the floor and got up.

  “How about a little billiards, Michael?” he said, and they went out, taking Agnes Hutton with them.

  Cheryl and Perry were both intent on their hands. She had remarkable control, but I’d discovered that when her eyes were widest, and her face had a sort of plastic wooden-ness, she was the most intensely aware of things. I avoided looking at her when major Ellicott came back into the living room and said something about three being a crowd. Nobody at the bridge table paid any attention to him, except possibly Perry Bassett, who went down four doubled, redoubled and vulnerable. But he was likely to do that any time.

  Dr. Sartoris and Mrs. Trent were still out when Mr. Archer announced, rather testily, that he was going to bed-Cheryl moved her chair back, saying she’d have to pay me in the morning—twenty-eight cents, I think we’d won—and strolled over to Major Ellicott. He looked up at her and smiled.

  “I’m tired, Dick,” she said.

  “You’d better get off to bed, dear.”

  “I want to talk to you a few minutes. Can’t we go outside?”

  “You’ll take cold, Cheryl,” Perry protested. He was counting out twenty-eight cents to Mr. Archer.

  I said good night and went upstairs. I met Agnes Hutton on the landing and we went up together.

  “Sleepy?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Come in and have a cigarette with me.”

  I went in with her. Her room was just like mine, except that she had an efficient-looking table with a typewriter on it in front of one window.

  She tossed the book she was carrying—it was the same copy of the Contes Drolatiques—on the bed and dropped into a chair by the fireplace.

  “What time are you going tomorrow?” she asked abruptly.

  “After lunch,” I replied.

  She didn’t say anything for a few moments. Then she said, “Would you do something for me?”

  I hesitated.

  She shrugged her slim shoulders and raised one corner of her carefully rouged mouth in a sardonic little smile.

  “Sounds odd, doesn’t it?” she said. “But I can’t explain exactly. I’ll tell you this much—I’m up to my neck in something I wish I was out of. It looks like I’m welshing at the last minute. Well, I guess that’s what I am doing.”

  “Look here, Miss Hutton,” I said. “Don’t tell me anything you don’t want Lieutenant Kelly to know, because I promised I’d tell him anything I heard—that might help him find out who murdered Mr. Trent.”

  She laughed, and it wasn’t a very pleasant sound.

  “I didn’t shoot Mr. Trent,” she said coolly. “And that’s why I want to get awav from here. Have you heard about his will?”

  “No.”

  “You will soon. Dick Ellicott and Archer are joint trustees with Mrs. Trent. She gets a third of the estate, in cash, bonds and so on. Cheryl gets the rest of it, free of all restrictions on her twenty-first birthday.”

  “Isn’t that what everybody expected?”

  “Yes—but Michael Spur’s back. And Michael Spur’s money doesn’t exist any more, except on paper. And paper doesn’t amount to much right now. Trent and Spur stock is off the market—they dropped it when it got to one and three-quarters. In nineteen-twenty-eight it was two hundred fifteen. Michael owns nine-tenths of the stock. He bought everybody else’s stock at two hundred—especially Mr. Trent’s.”

  “Does he know it?”

  “Yes. I told him.”

  “When?”

  “Last Christmas. When I was visiting in Bermuda.”

  “Bermuda?”

  “Oh, Arizona, then.”

  She laughed again, much the same way as before.

  “You know, I was in love with Michael for a long time. I even hated him for a long time until Victor showed me that was just another form of being in love with him. So I snapped out of it. I’m rather sorry for him, now. That’s why I’ve got to get out—I know too much about all this. And I want you to do something for me.”

  “What is it?” I said practically.

  “If you won’t do it, will you regard it as between you and me?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. I want you to take a few things to New York for me when you go tomorrow. This book and a few things I’ll leave in the top drawer of that dresser. I’ll be there as quick as you are.”

  She leaned forward, and all her mocking superior manner was gone. I saw her as I knew she was, an intelligent, levelheaded woman who’d got caught between the millstones of a thwarted emotional life. I didn’t feel sorry for her. She wasn’t that sort.

  “If you’ll do that for me, Louise Cather, I’ll be very glad,” she said in a low voice, as if she thought someone might be listening to her. “I didn’t kill Mr. Trent. That’s top level, as Michael says. But I’ve got to get out, that’s all.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll do that. If I don’t get away tomorrow, I’ll bring them when I come. Is that all right? “

  She hesitated a moment.

  “Yes. That’s all right. Give me your New York phone number. If I don’t get you there, I’ll phone you here tomorrow night.”
>
  I gave her my number and she went with me to the door. Dr. Sartoris was just coming out of Michael Spur’s room. I was surprised to see his face. The amused confident diagnosing expression was gone; he looked like a man who was genuinely troubled about something.

  When he saw us, he was immediately himself again, though he was rather cool to me. “Perhaps you can tell me something, Miss Hutton,” he said. I left them standing in the hall and went into my own room. Several times in the next hour I thought of going back and telling Agnes that I’d changed my mind and that probably Lieutenant Kelly wasn’t going to let me go tomorrow. But I didn’t. I plastered my face with some cold cream out of a very exotic looking jar in the bathroom, wiped it off and went to bed. I didn’t wake up until Aspasia knocked at my door and said Miss Cheryl was riding for an hour before breakfast and would I like to join her.

  Cheryl and Major Ellicott were waiting for me with a sleek beautifully poised chestnut mare, and we started out, Cheryl in the lead. She was headed for the poplar lane shimmering across the gardens in the early morning sun.

  “Let’s take Miss Cather down by the golf course, Cheryl,” Major Ellicott suggested. But Cheryl said she wanted to go down to the beach.

  “You’re the general,” said Major Ellicott, and we continued along the drive until Cheryl turned by the little lake near the gate. The black swan swam quickly to the edge of the pool—it was what the English would call an “ornamental water”—and gobbled up the bread Cheryl threw him. She was in much lighter spirits than I’d seen her before, and she cantered ahead and waited for Major Ellicott and me with our more leisurely pace.

  It was a heavenly morning as we rode through the poplar lane, Major Ellicott pointing out various things he wanted to do with the place. At last we came into view of the dogwood and Judas Tree. My mare picked her way down the steep terrace, and we entered a sort of fairyland of waxen and magenta blossoms, cool and fragrant as they brushed my cheeks. I was still ahead of Major Ellicott. Cheryl had disappeared entirely. I was leaning back to listen to Major Ellicott telling me about Mr. Trent’s passion for dogwood, and how they always came here in the spring no matter what happened—when suddenly from somewhere in the snowy distance there came a high blood-curdling scream. I dug my heels into the mare, and she burst into a gallop. Major Ellicott was behind me, pressing to take the lead as the path through the woods widened. But he didn’t make it. We turned sharply into a small clearing, and I saw Cheryl half standing in the stirrups, her reins taut, her horse backing from something in front of him. I got to her before Major Ellicott did—and I saw it, just as my mare jerked back from the horrible thing in front of us.