The Tree of Death

by Marcia Muller

  Dangerous. Alone, this was very dangerous.

  I left my sandals on the floor by the archway and tiptoed to the cellar door. The stone steps were cold on the soles of my feet. I put a hand out to touch the clammy wall, then felt for the edge of each step with my toes. As I descended, I saw that it was dark at the bottom of the stairs, but the front of the cellar was illuminated by flashlight.

  At the foot of the steps I paused. Boxes and crates blocked my way, and all I could see was the light shining around them. Noises, as if someone was rummaging around, came from up there. I inched forward, the cold of the earthen floor numbing my bare feet. The space between the packing cases was narrow, and I had to avoid bumping into them.

  The killer had the flashlight, I reminded myself. If I got closer to that light, it would help me confirm my suspicions. But it also could be dangerous if turned on me. I began to feel the boxes around me, noting spaces into which I could duck.

  Ahead of me, the rummaging stopped. Quickly I moved behind a packing case. There was a heavy sigh. Then the rummaging resumed. I moved along, one case closer, two cases, three.

  “Maldito!” The curse was whispered, the voice unrecognizable. Still, I knew who had uttered it.

  I inched along. Another box. Another.

  How soon before the murderer found the milagros? Turned? Showed me the face I expected?

  I reached the last box. The glow of the flash fully illuminated this end of the cellar, but all I could see were the floor joists and the little high window. I would have to step around the box, into the open, to see the killer.

  The rummaging stopped again. There was a deep groan of despair. I moved out into the aisle.

  And came face to face with Isabel.

  Her long hair straggled from its combs. The peasant blouse hung off one shoulder. The upward beam of the flashlight caught and accentuated the lines of strain on her sallow face.

  Unfortunately, the beam also illuminated me.

  “Madre de Dios!” She drew out the words in a hiss, her eyes widening.

  I stepped back.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded. Trust Isabel, when cornered, to try to put her captor on the defensive.

  I held my ground. “What’s the matter, Isabel? Can’t you find the milagros?”

  “You bitch! You made it all up. There aren’t any here.”

  Yes, there are. I reached up to the back of the shelf. “You would have found them if you hadn’t been so impatient.” I opened the box and showed her one, the stylized woman’s head.

  She stared at it. “That’s… that’s not one of the milagros Frank imported. I recognize it. It’s yours. I remember the day you bought it from the artist.”

  “Yes, it’s mine.”

  “Then why is it down here?”

  “I planted it. So there would be proof.”

  “Proof!” She laughed harshly. “Proof of what?”

  “That you were the one who attacked me down here last night and removed the other artworks. That you drove me up north in my car and dumped me in the field when you ran out of gas. That you murdered Frank.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Is it? Then what are you doing down here, looking for this?” I shoved the milagro under her nose.

  She slapped my hand away. “I’m trying to save this museum, you fool. You don’t care about that. You would go to the police about Frank’s indiscretions. You would bring it all out in the open. You’d drag our name through the mud. All I’m doing is trying to save-”

  “You’re trying to save yourself.”

  Isabel’s lips drew back in a snarl. She moved forward and slapped my hand again, knocking the milagro to the floor. Then she grabbed me by the shoulders and began shaking me. Her fury unleashed a terrible strength.

  I wrenched away from her, stumbling back against an empty packing case. It collapsed and I fell to the floor. I struggled to sit up.

  Isabel was upon me immediately, grabbing me by the throat. I tried to push her away, but her arms were long enough that I couldn’t reach her. I kicked out at her legs; that did me no good either. I tried to pry her fingers loose, but they were locked tight.

  Isabel dragged me to my feet. Her hands tightened on my throat. It hurt, and I had trouble getting my breath. I rolled my eyes, looking frantically for a weapon.

  Racks of paintings… the shattered remains of the arbol de la vida… a figurine of Quetzalcoatl… a bronze and silver Hispanic sword…

  My terror brought a sudden burst of strength. I managed to break Isabel’s hold on my neck and lunged for the sword. My fingers grabbed its hilt, slipped off. Isabel pulled me back by the shoulder.

  I turned, smacking her across the face. She screamed and let go. I grabbed the sword.

  As I spun around, its tip nearly caught her in the eye. She stared at it, frozen, then backed off and scurried down the aisle between the boxes, out of the flashlight’s beam. Her sandals slapped toward the stairway. I followed, dragging the heavy sword.

  Isabel ran up the steps and threw open the door. Welcome light poured into the cellar. For a second she stood silhouetted there.

  “Help!” she screamed. “She’s trying to kill me!” Then • she started to run down the hall.

  There was a pounding of feet on the floorboards above. They were heavily shod, not sandaled like Isabel’s. I bounded up the stairs.

  Dave Kirk stood in the middle of the hall. Isabel was midway between him and the cellar door.

  “Stop her!” I shouted. “She’s the murderer!”

  Isabel looked back at me, then flung herself at Kirk. “Please help me! She killed Frank and now she wants to kill me!” She sagged against him, panting.

  I stopped. “She’s lying. She’s the one…”

  Kirk put his arms around Isabel. His bland brown eyes met mine, shifted to the sword in my hands.

  Whom was he going to believe? Isabel, because of her social status and respectability? Or me, because I was telling the truth?

  Isabel clung to Kirk, not looking at me. “She wants me dead. Just like she wanted Frank dead…” The words trailed off into a low cry.

  Kirk put his hand over Isabel’s mouth and, with his other hand, pinned her arms behind her back. She struggled, but he held her firmly.

  Relief coursed through me. Kirk had seen through Isabel’s dramatics; he’d recognized the truth. Then, looking up at the ceiling light, I realized he’d known even before Isabel had burst into the hall. He must have been here, listening to what was going on in the cellar, because the light had been off when I’d gone down there but had been on when Isabel reached the top of the stairs.

  I looked back at him. His eyes, still incredibly bland, again moved from my face to the Hispanic sword.

  “So,” he said, “who are you supposed to be-Zorro?”

  seventeen

  When I got home from the doctor’s the next afternoon, my mother was holding court under the pepper tree in my back yard. She had dragged out the blue-flowered tea set I’d bought at a flea market several years before and was serving what I knew had to be Upton’s along with tiny circles of lemon and some very stale vanilla wafers.

  I stopped in the back door, smiling. To Mama’s right sat Carlos Bautista, looking dignified as he balanced the delicate cup and saucer. To her left was Dave Kirk, looking as though he could use a beer. The two men got to their feet as I went out into the yard.

  “What’s all this about?” I pulled up the remaining lawn chair and motioned for them to sit.

  “Mr. Bautista came by to see if you were all right,”‘ Mama said, nodding at the board chairman. “As did Lieutenant Kirk. You are all right?”

  “Yes, the doctor gave me a clean bill of health.”

  She sighed with relief and poured me some tea. She’d shown up here early this morning, as soon as she’d heard the news and, after taking one look at the disorder in my house, had started cleaning. She’d been working on the kitchen when I left for the doctor’s.
>
  I turned to Dave Kirk. I was no longer angry at him. He had apologized for his earlier treatment of me and, surprisingly, admitted he had not suspected Isabel until he saw her use a key to slip into the museum after the party the night before. Foolishly, she had not thought to reset the alarm once inside, so Kirk had followed, searching through the galleries and offices until he heard the commotion in the cellar.

  Now I asked Kirk, “Did Isabel confess yet?”

  He shook his head. “It’s not likely she will. Her first call was to Al Faxstein, that criminal lawyer., He came right down and has been ‘defending her civil rights’ ever since.” Kirk’s mouth twisted in annoyance.

  “He won’t get her off, will he?”

  “No. Don’t worry.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Robert De Palma and Vic Leary have been arrested. So has the Sanchez woman, although she’s claiming she didn’t know anything about the embezzlements. We don’t really have anything on her, but she doesn’t know that, and we’re hoping she’ll talk. Some of the funds they appropriated were from federal grants. The guys from Washington are interested in them, too.”

  “How’s Vic doing?”

  “He seems relieved, strangely enough.”

  It probably eased some of his guilt, past and present, to have been caught. “Wait a minute. What about Tony?”

  Kirk grinned. Carlos looked amused. My mother scowled. “Tony,” Kirk said, “got on a plane to Colombia before we could issue the warrant.”

  “What’s so funny about that?”

  “His wife refused to go with him.”

  “What?”

  “She said she would rather make her way alone in the United States than return to what she calls ‘that backward place.” “

  “To go off and leave poor Susana like that,” Mama muttered.

  Carlos added, “Don’t be surprised if she comes to you for a job. Elena.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “When I spoke with her, that seemed to be her intention.”

  “She can’t do anything.”

  Carlos merely smiled and gave me a very Latin shrug.

  We all sipped tea in silence for a time. Then Mama said, “Elena, do you know why Isabel killed Frank?”

  “I think so. I’m pretty sure she’d found out about the embezzlements. Isabel was very active in museum affairs. She was everywhere, doing everything from making bank deposits to helping me arrange the exhibits. If anyone could catch on to what they were doing, it was Isabel. And, remember, she was always afraid Frank would do something to ruin the museum. She watched him every minute.”

  “But to kill him…”

  “She didn’t plan to, I’m sure. That afternoon, before I left, she said she was going to have a few words with him. I think she was going to tell him what she’d found out and warn him to quit. Or maybe she didn’t even know that much and was just going to question him. Anyway, when I left, she was still in the museum, maybe in the ladies’ room or checking on supplies in the kitchen, as she often did. Then she went looking for him and when she finally found him, it was in the folk art gallery.”

  “And she killed him,” Mama said flatly.

  “No, I doubt it was that way. She confronted him. They argued. She realized he would destroy the museum, and the museum was all she had, now that her marriage had fallen apart. Remember the conversation we had with Nick? About how a man like Frank would have driven Isabel mad?”

  Mama nodded.

  “Well, that’s what he did. Isabel had always deferred to Don Francisco, as she did to her husband. But, like Douglas Cunningham, Frank finally did something that caused all her repressed rage to boil over. With her husband, she could express it by divorcing him. With Frank…” I stopped. The picture was too vivid in my mind.

  “Well, she may not have planned to kill Frank, but what about you?” My mother’s eyes were flashing. “She was the one who hit you and left you out in that field to die, wasn’t she?”

  “I don’t think she knew what she was doing then. She hit me in a panic. Probably she thought she’d killed me. I have a slow heartbeat, and she might not have been able to find my pulse. The whole thing was pretty clumsy.”

  “You’re too charitable.”

  “Well, actually if she hadn’t done it, I might never have realized she was the murderer.”

  Carlos leaned forward, looking interested. “Now we’re getting to the part I want to hear. How did you catch on to her?”

  “First, I realized she was the only person I had told about finding those boxes of artifacts in the cellar. At the time, I told her I’d first thought the killer had hidden in the museum all night. That probably gave her the idea to hide there and remove the artifacts after dark. She had to hide because she didn’t have any way to get in after I sent everybody home and set the alarm that afternoon. Isabel was the only person who knew I’d found those artifacts and might go to the police. And obviously, she didn’t want the police around there any more than necessary. She had some idea she was saving the museum from ruin-as well as saving herself.”

  Carlos said, “Isn’t that a pretty flimsy reason for suspecting her?”

  “Alone, yes. But there was also, I guess you’d call it a clue”-I looked at Kirk-“that I’d seen even before I knew Frank had been murdered.” • “What?” Mama asked.

  “A dirt smudge on Isabel’s tennis dress. It wasn’t there when I last saw her at the museum, but it was there when I ran into her at the supermarket later that night. It stayed in my mind because Isabel is usually so immaculate.”

  “What does a dirt smudge have to do with killing Frank?”

  “Isabel got it when she was making her mysterious exit from the locked museum-the thing that had us all puzzled.”

  “Ah, yes,” Carlos said. “Exactly how did she manage that?”

  “This way: There were two sets of keys to the alarm system and the padlock on the gate. The alarm keys had never been duplicated. I had my set, so Frank’s keys had to leave with Isabel so she could reset the alarm. But they were still in the museum the next morning. Obviously she had to have put them back somehow.”

  Carlos frowned. “But if she put them back, she’d have to go inside, and that meant she’d have to turn off the alarm.”

  “Not really. She didn’t go back inside. She left by a door other than the front one; the alarm lock position indicated that. It could have been the loading dock, but then there wouldn’t have been any way she could replace the keys. So it had to be the door to Frank’s courtyard. She went out there and set the alarm with the key. Then she went down the path to the gate and opened the padlock. She returned to the courtyard and took a stake from one of the new azalea plants, looped the key ring over the tip, and slipped the keys back on the hook on Frank’s wall through the bars over the office window.”

  “But wouldn’t you,” Carlos said, nodding at Kirk, “have noticed if the window was open the next morning?”

  “Yes. It wasn’t.”

  “Then how…?”

  “The windows are old,” I said, “and the latches work loosely. Isabel probably tested this all before she went outside. If you slam the window, the latch will fall into place. And that’s what she did. Then all she had to do was go through the gate and lock the padlock after her. It was as if she’d never been inside.”

  “But,” Carlos said, “how did you know this?”

  “I put three facts together. First, the stake was missing from the plant nearest the window. It had fallen through the cellar window grate. Isabel was probably nervous and dropped it and then couldn’t get it out. The stake hadn’t been down there when I left because Frank had just finished tying the plant to it.

  “Second, when she slammed the window, she did it too hard and cracked it down in one corner. I knew it was a recent crack because we’d inspected the building for things like that before we took possession.

  “And, third, Isabel was clumsy when she slipped the keys on the hook; it’
s a difficult angle to work from. She got a dirt smudge on the wall right over the hook. It hadn’t been there that afternoon before I left.”

  “And the dirt smudge on the wall matched the one on her tennis dress,” my mother said.

  “Right.”

  “My smart daughter.”‘

  “Smart? Hah! It took me three days to figure this all out.”

  “At least you figured it.” Mama gave Dave Kirk a stern look.

  Kirk had the grace to look embarrassed.

  Carlos cleared his throat. “Lieutenant, this super lawyer-he won’t get Isabel off, will he?”

  “No,” Kirk said, “we’ve already got plenty of evidence. She had the keys to the museum in her purse when we arrested her, so we know for sure she was the person who hit Elena and drove her up the highway. And we’ve got a witness, a man who picked Isabel up when she was hitchhiking back into town. Her fingerprints are superimposed over Frank’s on that garden stake-fortunately it’s the kind of finish that takes prints well-so we can prove she was the last person to touch it before it went down into that grating. And, finally, we found a fragment of the tree of death in her car-a little terra-cotta skull from one of its branches.”

  It was a final, chilling touch.

  “Well,”‘ Carlos said briskly, “we have our work cut out for us. The museum staff has been reduced to two.”

  “I want to dismiss Maria,” I said.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Call it starting with a clean slate.”

  Carlos smiled; he’d used the same words yesterday. “Do as you see fit.”

  Kirk set down his teacup and stood. “I’d better get back to the station,” he said. Then, surprisingly, he took my hand. “I must apologize again, Elena. I should have paid more attention to your… tidbits of information. Ah, can I call on you in the future?”

  “For what?” I asked.

  He grinned. “More tidbits. Or just some good conversation.”

  “Of course.” I glanced at Carlos and saw a flicker of annoyance cross his face. He stepped forward and took my hand as soon as Kirk let go of it.

  “And we must have a conversation about the museum,” he said. “Perhaps over dinner tomorrow. I’ll call you in the morning.”‘ Then he gave Kirk a smug look that made me want to laugh.