The Clue of the Judas Tree

by Zenith Brown

  I clenched my teeth, assured myself it was too late to turn back, and went downstairs, holding tightly to the banister, and listening for any sound in the gray overwhelming silence. The light in the library was still on; I could see the faint glow under the door; and I ran to it, seized the knob, turned it, and threw the door open with a great wave of relief. “Oh, Mr. Trent!” I gasped.

  He was sitting there at the table, just where I had left him, with a pile of papers in front of him. But he did not look up, and I stopped short.

  Something stark and primitive laid an icy hand on my heart and drained all power of movement out of my body. It wasn’t Mr. Trent who was sitting there at the table—it was death. Death with a head sagging forward, and hand stretched out in front of him, and creeping blood dyeing the starched white bosom of his shirt a living red—like the blossom of the Judas Tree in the waxen banks of the dogwood.

  It seemed to me that the pulse of time stopped while I stood there and only the creeping blood moved and swelled. It seemed an eternity, then, but it couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen seconds that I stared, speechless, horribly fascinated, at his sagging head, the gaping wound in his breast, his arms and hands flung out on the table, the papers around them, and the small blueblack revolver lying there among the papers. It was the sight of it that brought me to life. I stepped forward.

  And just as I did there was a sharp click, and the library was plunged into total darkness.

  For one instant the hard bright image of that terrible scene in front of me stayed in my vision, and even now I can close my eyes and see it—Mr. Trent, the papers, the gun. If only I could have screamed, someone might have come. But I’ve never screamed in my life. I ran blindly across the room and out into the other hall, and then blundered upstairs, and called, panic-stricken, desperate.

  Oddly enough, it was Dr. Sartoris I called. Even odder than that, it was Agnes Hutton who appeared first out of the door next to mine. Then other doors opened, until the dark channel had five more bars of light across it. Perry Bassett, Major Ellicott, Dr. Sartoris, Agnes Hutton and Michael Spur were all out there.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I told them what had happened.

  What I remember most clearly now is the abrupt hushed silence, and the way every head turned to Michael Spur as if he’d been a magnet and they were bits of iron. He looked blankly at me, and then at Major Ellicott, standing next to him. Then the color drained from his face and neck, and he raised his left hand to his forehead, and slowly, like a man in a dream, ran his trembling fingers through his curly tousled hair to the nape of his neck.

  “My God!” he whispered, and swayed for a second, dazed.

  Major Ellicott caught him firmly by the shoulder.

  “Brace up, old man,” he said sharply. “Get back in your room and stay there, will you, until Doyle gets out here. Agnes, wake Archer and send him downstairs.”

  I was left standing there, thinking in spite of everything that it was odd that nobody seemed to think of Cheryl and her mother. Then I heard a door open somewhere behind me, and I turned quickly. Cheryl had turned on the light in the transverse hall at the end of the one in which I was standing. She came sleepily toward me.

  “What’s the matter, Louise?”

  My face must have frightened her. Her blue eyes suddenly widened, her lips parted breathlessly.

  “There’s been an accident, Cheryl,” I said gently. “Your father.”

  “He’s dead?” she gasped.

  She clutched my arm tightly.

  “Yes, Cheryl.”

  She closed her eyes as if to break the force of the shock. I thought for a moment that she was going to faint, but she didn’t. Her grip on my arm tightened, and she leaned forward, every nerve in her body tragically and intensely alive.

  “Where is he?” she said.

  “In the library.”

  “I’ve got to go down.”

  I caught her arm.

  “No,” I said. “You don’t want to go down. It’s rather bad.”

  “I’ve got to, Louise! You don’t understand. They don’t care what happens to him!”

  “Cheryl dear!” I said as gently as I could, to make her understand. “It’s too late. There’s nothing you can do. Nobody can do anything for him.”

  “They can hang him!” she cried passionately. She tore away from me and ran wildly down the hall.

  For the first time I understood that it wasn’t her father she was talking about. It was Michael Spur.

  One thing stands out in my mind in the confusion that followed in the next few hours. That was the tacit agreement, not expressed in so many words by anybody but Cheryl, but perfectly definite nevertheless, that the murder of Mr. Trent was not his tragedy. The tragedy was Michael Spur’s. Duncan Trent was an accident. Any one of us might have been sitting there with a bullet through his heart, staring into eternity. It had simply happened to Mr. Trent, and not someone else, and that was all. “A prawn in the hands of fate,” Mrs. Trent had called him, with a certain tragic triumph. “I told him so,” she said. “You can’t get away from psychology. He should have listened to Victor.”

  It was curious how quickly she dropped any pretense of being on purely formal terms with Dr. Sartoris. She gave the impression of simply turning over her problems to him as if anything that was hers was his too—even a murdered husband. And I must say he rose to the occasion with exactly the sympathetic impressiveness I expected of him. It seemed to annoy Mr. Archer, but he’d been annoyed from the beginning. First at being got out of bed at two o’clock (Perry Bassett whispered to me that he hated having his rest broken, he was most particular about it), and second at Mrs. Trent for keeping everyone waiting, once he was up.

  It did take her a very long time to come down. The long streak of mud under her ear, where she hadn’t got quite all her complexion pack washed off, was excuse enough for anyone’s being slow. There was no particular reason for Mr. Archer to object to her pastel rainbow-hued marabou and peach lace and satin negligee, or to the elaborate and artfully tousled curls over her ear. Except, of course, that it was all rather silly and heartless.

  Mr. Archer had no more than time to call her a wicked old woman when Mr. Doyle, the State’s Attorney from Annapolis, showed up with Dr. O’Brien. Dr. O’Brien was the coroner, and he was very short and very fat, with a definitely pre-Volstead nose, and generally rather jowly and purple. He wheezed when he talked, and he smoked perfectly foul cigars, which he parked around on mantels and tables so they were always getting knocked off. However, he turned out to be unexpectedly kind-hearted and even sweet about everything, and I don’t know how we’d have managed without him.

  “You see cases like this cropping up all the time,” he said in a whiskey bass, putting down his bag and parking his cigar and snaking hands with Major Ellicott. Both he and Dr. Doyle seemed to know Michael Spur, and to know he was home, and that he’d “gone off again,” as Mr. Doyle put it. “Had one last year,” Dr. O’Brien went on. “Fella used a hatchet, blood all over the kitchen.”

  He looked at me, shook his head, and cleared his throat.

  “I never get used to it. Always makes me nauseated. Once I was in Venezuela . . .”

  “All right, Mr. Archer, we’ll look into it,” said Mr. Doyle briskly. “You can count on us.”

  He had been talking with Mr. Archer in low tones in the doorway.

  “Ready, Joe?”

  Dr. O’Brien picked up his bag and went out into the hall. Major Ellicott followed him, and left me and Agnes Hutton alone. Dr. Sartoris and Mrs. Trent were upstairs with Cheryl and Perry Bassett. Michael, as far as I knew, was still alone in his room.

  I glanced over at Agnes Hutton. She was resting her head against the high carved back of a chair with a red velvet seat and gold tassels, staring abstractedly up at the oak-beamed ceiling. She was rather pale, I thought, and her lower lip was caught when I looked at her under the sharp white edge of her teeth. She was a curious contrast to Mrs.
Trent. She had on a green flannel tailored dressing gown, her hair was neatly brushed back from her high white forehead, her face was calm but there was something terribly poignant in her dark eyes, gazing unseeingly at the ceiling. At last she looked down and our eyes met.

  “In Venezuela,” she said coolly, “they hung up four men in front of Dr. O’Brien’s house and cut pieces off them twice a day. That’s his story, and he’s stuck to it, winter and summer, for twelve years that I know of. You might as well get used to it. Oh God, what a mess!”

  She got up and began to walk up and down in front of the fireplace. Then she sat down.

  “That’s funny too,” she said.

  I looked blankly at her. I hadn’t noticed either what was funny then or anything funny before.

  “I learned that from him,” she said. “He always paced up and down when things got pretty foul. He was an awful old pirate, but I . . . I liked him. He was decent to me; and I’m telling you—for your information, I don’t give a damn about the rest of them—that I wasn’t his mistress. He never had one, or I guess I would have been.”

  I rather wished Dr. O’Brien would come back and tell me about Venezuela, but he wasn’t anywhere in sight.

  Agnes Hutton had returned to her study of the ceiling. I said, “It’s too bad.”

  “You’re telling me?”

  “No, I’m not telling you. I’m just saying it’s too bad he’s dead, that’s all.”

  But like Cheryl, I found I was thinking about Michael Spur, not about Mr. Trent. I glanced covertly at Agnes Hutton, wondering what she was really thinking about, looking up at the ceiling like that. Her hands were thrust deep into the pockets of her dressing gown, one knee was crossed on the other. She was quiet, rather, I thought, as a cat is quiet before it does something drastic about a bird. Now and then her free foot moved, the way a cat’s tail moves and is still again.

  “I suppose you’U want to get off to New York first thing in the morning,” she said after a long time.

  “I suppose so,” I said. As a matter of fact I hadn’t even thought of myself and what I was going to do. It seemed rather odd that she should have been thinking of it, when she must have had much more important things on her mind. For some reason, it made me a little uneasy. But I hadn’t time until later to give it much thought, for just then somebody opened the library door and we heard Mr. Doyle’s brisk business-like voice assuring Major Ellicott that everything would be taken care of with as little trouble as possible.

  They came into the living room where Agnes and I were. Dr. Sartoris was with them, and I gathered from what was said that Mr. Doyle and Dr. O’Brien both agreed with him that Michael Spur should be left in his care until Mr. Doyle had talked the situation over with Judge Rose in the morning. Dr. O’Brien had certified the cause of death to have been a bullet that pierced the heart and caused instant death. He told Dr. Sartoris that he thought any doctor familiar with the case history would have predicted the present tragedy, and seemed in some way to imply that Mr. Trent had got about what was coming to him for not having taken the precautions that were suggested.

  I don’t think Mr. Archer liked it very much, seeing Dr. O’Brien so obviously impressed by the New York specialist, but he didn’t say anything. His face got a couple of shades redder and he snorted twice. But no one paid any attention to him. Major Ellicott said that he hadn’t realized the gravity of the situation, but that he was now willing to advise Mrs. Trent to go the limit in protecting Michael from the consequences of his folly. Agnes Hutton smiled her Mona Lisa smile at that. I didn’t realize how funny it was. I found out shortly that the surest way to stop Mrs. Trent from doing anything was to have Major Ellicott suggest it to her. At the time his statement seemed very impressive to me. I thought Agnes was smiling just because she was rather horrid.

  Mr. Archer and Dr. Sartoris went with Mr. Doyle to see Mrs. Trent. When they came down Dr. O’Brien, who had been talking quietly in” the hall with Major Ellicott, went up again with Dr. Sartoris to give Cheryl a sedative. They must have given Michael something pretty stiff, because I heard Dr. O’Brien say he guessed that would hold him till morning, and Dr. Sartoris agreed that it certainly ought to.

  It wasn’t until they had their hats on and were leaving that Agnes Hutton brought up a point that was certainly sensible enough, but was rather startling at first, by asking Mr. Doyle if he wasn’t going to lock the library.

  Mr. Doyle looked surprised, and she explained that Mr. Trent kept a number of valuable papers there, and that he had always made a practice of locking the room at night, which, as it turned out, was perfectly untrue. However, Mr. Doyle locked it, and gave the key to Mr. Archer, who put it in a drawer in the hall table as soon as Dr. O’Brien’s Ford coupé had rattled out of the drive.

  Agnes watched Mr. Archer with her slow smile.

  “That wasn’t very clever of me after all, was it,” she remarked, and shrugged her shoulders.

  “I guess I’ll go to bed. Coming?”

  But I don’t think she did go to bed. Ï heard her moving about in her room, next to mine, for a long time after I’d turned out my light, and when I woke up about five o’clock I heard her bath water running.

  I lay there in Queen Elizabeth’s bed, trying to think what she reminded me of. All I could think of was a white gardenia I once saw on the desk of the Police Commissioner in New York. It had enough high explosive tucked carefully in between its waxen petals to blow Ivy Hill into a million pieces.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It was eight o’clock when I woke again. The sun was streaming in, a cardinal was singing just outside, and Aspasia was standing there with my breakfast tray, with a single yellow tulip in a delicate silver Vase next to a beautiful silver coffee pot, saying, “Good morning, miss. Where would you like your tray? “

  It took me a long second to remember that Mr. Trent was downstairs, dead—murdered—and that Michael Spur and Cheryl Trent were waking from drugged forgetfulness to the tragic memory of the night before.

  “I could put it on the table by the window, miss,” Aspasia said and while she was doing it I got into my dressing gown and picked up the folded paper.

  “It’s not in the papers, miss,” she said. “But Magothy found a reporter from Baltimore sittin’ on the steps when I got up this mornin’, so I reckon it’ll be in today.”

  I nodded. Aspasia was a high yaller, and I suppose that accounted for her detached interest in her employer’s murder.

  “Of course,” she added, pouring my coffee, “we wasn’t surprised. Magothy locked all our doors last night, and he wouldn’t go out this mornin’, not until the Major knocked on the door his self. Is there anything else, miss?”

  “Nothing, thanks,” I said.

  I was finishing my third cup of coffee when there was a tap on my door. I said “Come in,” and was rather surprised when I saw Dr. Sartoris, in cool white linen, looking grave and formal.

  “Forgive my disturbing you,” he said, closing the door again and coming across the room. “May I sit down?” “Why, yes . . . if you like,” I said. He sat down and lighted a cigarette.

  “I’ve come from Mrs. Trent, Miss Gather,” he said, looking at me; and I had exactly the same warm confused feeling about him that I’d had when he first spoke to me on the train. Except that I hadn’t any make-up on my face to protect me from letting him see that he affected me just as he did Mrs. Trent, and Cheryl, and Agnes Hutton. He smiled ever so faintly, and Ï got perfectly furious—at myself for being stupid, and at him for . . . well, for knowing it. It seemed to me a shoddy sort of business, this going around and making women’s hearts turn over, and all the rest of it, just for practice. It was like an animal trainer who couldn’t ever go out without taking his giraffe along with him. Granting that making women fall in love with him, or at least fall heavily for him, is a psychoanalyst’s stock in trade, or a psychotherapist’s, as he called himself, it did annoy me very much that he couldn’t drop it for five minutes. Or anyw
ay, it annoyed me to find myself as susceptible to him as a sixteen-year-old.

  “Do you enjoy having every woman you meet fall in love with you, Dr. Sartoris?” I asked, thinking I might just as well let him know that I wasn’t being taken in, even if I couldn’t prevent my heart from doing odd things when he looked at me.

  He smiled.

  “No,” he said coolly. “As a matter of fact I don’t. Frequently it’s very annoying.”

  It seemed to me that he should at least have had grace enough to demur a little. But he didn’t. In fact he said, “Are you planning to write the story of my great success? “

  “I hadn’t thought of it. Why?”

  “Well, since you’ve put your finger on the only reason for it, I thought you might be analyzing me as possible material. Now that . . .”

  He hesitated, and blew a suave blue funnel of smoke toward the window.

  “Now that Mr. Trent is dead,” I said. But his eyes were grave again.

  “Mrs. Trent asked me to give you her sincere regards,” he said almost abruptly; “and to tell you she knows you’ll want to get away. There’s a train at ten from the station down the road. She’s ordered the car for you at nine-forty-five and is very sorry that your visit was interrupted so tragically. She hopes that she’ll have the pleasure of seeing you some time in the future.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Sartoris,” I said. “Will you give Mrs. Trent my sincere regards, and tell her I’ll be ready at a quarter of ten. Good-bye.”

  I held out my hand. He rose, and took it. Even then he couldn’t forego pressing it just enough not to commit himself but to imply some way that there was a special bond between us. However, I’d got over my momentary lapse, and I saw him again as a handsome and charming charlatan—who, furthermore, was glad I was leaving.