The Clue of the Judas Tree

by Zenith Brown

  “She told me that,” I said. “Lieutenant Kelly knew it too.”

  He looked surprised.

  “Well, she told me a lot of stuff about what was going on here. Trent was playing fast and loose with my share of the business. I got pretty sore. Then she left and I got to thinking it over. I decided to let it go. I didn’t want to come back, and I’d done well enough out there. So I didn’t do anything about it.”

  He started to get up, and sat down again.

  “Well, when I got to New York I wrote her I was going abroad, and I was signing over my interest in Trent and Spur to Cheryl. You see . . . well, I’m not in love with Cheryl, but she’s sort of a link between me and my father, and all that. I wanted her to have anything they’d left me. Well, I got a letter back saying that was fine—Cheryl was marrying Dick Ellicott in June, I owned all of Trent and Spur and it wasn’t worth a damn and Cheryl could probably use the stock to paper the summer house with. That made me sore.”

  “I thought you didn’t care?”

  “Well, I don’t care. But the idea of little Cheryl grown up enough to marry anybody sort of got me. It’s crazy, I suppose, but once I . . . nearly hurt her, pretty badly. She didn’t cry, and wasn’t afraid, and I never forgot it. Sometimes out in the desert in the deep blue nights I could close my eyes and remember the flannel of her pajama sleeve around my neck, and her cold little fingers on my cheek. I’d kept on thinking of her as a six-year-old still. I guess it was the idea of her being grown up made me want to come back.”

  “Then you didn’t want money from Mr. Trent?”

  He flushed.

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Lieutenant Kelly.”

  “That’s it, is it?” he said angrily. This time he did pace the floor. He stopped abruptly and stared down into my face.

  “Does Kelly think I murdered Trent in cold blood—and does he think I did that to Agnes Hutton?” he demanded.

  “I think the first is a definite possibility,” I said. “And I’ve even heard the second mentioned.”

  He sat down quietly in the chair by the fireplace.

  I proceeded to tell him several things. That practically everyone in the house subscribed to one or the other of the theories about Mr. Trent’s murder—either he had done it walking in his libido, as Mrs. Trent put it, or he’d done it in cold blood, deliberately. Cheryl was the only person who was absolutely convinced he was innocent.

  “Is that straight, Louise?” he demanded eagerly.

  “So help me,” I said. “In fact that’s what she went into your room to tell you, the other day, and you practically threw her out.”

  “How could I stand there and look at her, knowing I’d killed her father—don’t you see?”

  “Yes, I see,” I said. “But I don’t think she did. Why don’t you come along with me, and let’s talk to her about it.”

  He jumped up and went down to her room. She was lying on the sofa with a handkerchief folded over her eyes. She sat up and smiled a questioning, apprehensive little smile. I thought at first she’d been crying, but there was no trace of tears.

  “Sit down,” she said.

  I told her why we’d come, and that Michael denied having anything to do with either Mr. Trent’s death or Agnes’s, and that I thought the two of them ought to talk it over, and then we’d see what we could do.

  But she seemed to have changed since I’d seen her last. She straightened quickly, and looked at me and Michael as if she’d met us somewhere, but couldn’t quite remember either where or why.

  “I think Mr. Doyle and Lieutenant Kelly can manage very well,” she said coolly. “It’s very sweet of you both to come, but I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by . . . by our talking about it.”

  I stared at her, absolutely dumfounded. What had happened to the child? Then I looked at Michael. A dull flush had mounted his face. He got up and bowed with a sort of awkward dignity.

  “I’m sorry, Cheryl,” he said. “I misunderstood something Louise said.”

  Cheryl sat still and erect and white, staring at the door he closed quietly behind him. I stared at her.

  Suddenly her eyes widened.

  “Oh, Michael!” she cried, with a heartbreaking sob. She dashed across the room and threw open the door. I heard her feet pounding lightly in the deep carpet.

  “Michael!” she called. “Michael!”

  After a few moments she came back, broken and dejected, and fell on the floor at my feet, and buried her yellow head in my lap, sobs racking her slim body.

  “Oh, Louise! What have I done, what have I done?”

  “Something pretty bad, Cheryl,” I said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I left Cheryl and went out to find Lieutenant Kelly. I met Dick Ellicott in the hall. He asked where Cheryl was and I said out in the stables, that being the farthest away of any place I could think of offhand. Fortunately when I got downstairs I found Perry Bassett standing in the hall, turning his brown hat round and round in his rough hands, apparently wondering about something. I imagined something in his seed catalogue. I told him to go up and see what he could do with Cheryl. He nodded just as if he understood the whole situation and really had been waiting there until he could help out.

  Lieutenant Kelly had his horn-rimmed spectacles on and was sitting at the library table doing what he called “paper work.” It consisted mostly of chewing the already much mangled end of his “see-gar” and spitting the proceeds over his right shoulder. He was alone, and he seemed rather glad to see me, and listened with a growing scowl that got deeper and deeper when I got to the part about Cheryl running down the hall, crying “Michaeli Michael!”

  “What I want you to do,” I said, “is not to let Michael leave here until they come to some kind of an understanding.”

  “I think that’s very interesting, now,” he said sardonically. The cigar was virtually bitten in two at this point, so I felt justified in holding out an enormous pewter ashtray. He put the whole thing in it without thinking; thought too late, blinked at me and grinned sheepishly.

  “Don’t like my cigars, do you?”

  “You need a good rope to chew on,” I said. I took a handful of Mr. Trent’s cigars out of the carved box on the table and gave them to him. He grinned again and stuck them in his vest pocket. They were still there when I saw the last of him some days later. I don’t know where he kept his own.

  “All right, now, lady,” he said seriously. “You and me can just have our talk now. Shut the door, will you, and sit down.”

  I closed the door and came hack, and told him everything Agnes Hutton had told me, and what I’d done subsequently about getting the papers she’d left in her drawer for me to take to New York.

  He fairly glowed with self-approbation during my story. I didn’t understand it at first, and then it dawned on me that of course he’d expected something of the sort.

  He saw what I was thinking and nodded very smugly.

  “I kinda figured somebody’d try to get you to do that, if they knew you was leaving,” he said. “I was going to search your bags half a mile up the road.”

  “I thought that was all off when you found the revolver,” I said.

  “It ain’t the revolver Vm looking for, lady,” he said coolly. “Now let’s have a look at your papers.”

  We went upstairs and I showed him where I’d put them. He fished them out, and looked both disappointed and puzzled.

  “That all?” he demanded.

  I nodded.

  He threw them down on Queen Elizabeth’s bed with a grunt, and picked them up again. There was quite a packet of stenographer’s notebooks—ten altogether—and several large manilla envelopes, sealed and marked “Personal and Private—Agnes R. Hutton.”

  “Sure that’s all, lady?”

  “All except the book,” I replied. “I didn’t have a chance to get it. It’s still on her table.”

  “We’ll just have a look,” he said, and got a key
out of his pocket.

  When he had unlocked Agnes Hutton’s door he said, “Be careful, this place ain’t been done yet.” I gathered he meant that the photographers and so on hadn’t been there. I nodded and said, “It’s on the table there.”

  We went over to the table. There was a row of books supported by book-ends in the person of Shakespeare at one end and Dante at the other. There were about twenty books—Ann Vickers, The Cautious Amorist, a couple of dictionaries, two thin volumes in pale old parchment, whose authorship I could guess, the Rubaiyat, and Rupert Brooke. But the Droll Tales, bound in middle nineteenth century calf, was gone.

  “It was right there last night,” 1 said. “She must have forgot to leave it.”

  Lieutenant Kelly made a very rude noise. He bent over the end of the row and looked carefully at it, his hands thrust deep in his trousers pockets.

  “Mind you don’t touch it, and take a look right there,” he said, pointing. “That thing’s been moved in. See? You can see where it ain’t been dusted today.”

  I looked, and saw what he meant. There was a faint line that showed where the book-end ordinarily rested. It had been pushed in about the width of the Droll Tales.

  Lieutenant Kelly cocked a pale cold eye at me.

  “Now that’s right funny,” he said.

  I suppose I expected him to pull some sort of a rabbit out of his pocket in the way of immediately lining everybody up and getting the book without any more pother. But he didn’t seem in a hurry.

  “The boys’ll be here directly, and we’ll see,” he said. “The family’s leaving at two-thirty. That’ll leave the coast clear. It’s better to do these things without upsetting folks more’n you have to.”

  “But suppose whoever it is who has whatever you want takes it out with him today.”

  “I already figured that out, lady.”

  And then a great light dawned on me. It was just one of those rare things you don’t take any credit for. “Just a gift,” as the son of our butcher used to say when he carved the customers’ heads in big chunks of raw leaf lard.

  “Lieutenant,” I said, “are you by any chance hunting for the parcel that Cheryl Trent brought down from Baltimore the day I came? She said it was her father’s.”

  He looked at me impassively.

  “Lady!” he said slowly; “why in hell ain’t you told me this before? Where is it? “

  I had to admit I hadn’t the faintest idea, but I described it for him.

  “Miss Trent say what was in it?”

  “No.”.

  “You see it again?”

  I tried to remember. I had a faint recollection of seeing it on the library table when I was talking to Mr. Trent, but I hadn’t really noticed it then. It was just one of the things I’d recalled in trying to reconstruct the last few days. I certainly hadn’t attached any importance to it.

  Lieutenant Kelly still wouldn’t tell me what was in it.

  “It ain’t safe for you to know/’ he said very seriously. “Not after what happened down there in the woods.”

  I felt a sudden wave of grateful affection for this hardbitten methodical old man.

  “It’s dangerous for you, then, isn’t it?” I said.

  He grinned like an old satyr.

  “That’s my job,” he said. “It ain’t yours. That’s the difference. See?”

  Then another idea occurred to me.

  “Look,” I said. “What would you do if you were me-”

  And then I could have bitten my tongue off. I’d started to ask him what I ought to do about the Foster estate; and I suddenly realized how very curious it would look for Dr. Sartoris to have what was in effect a sixty thousand dollar interest (taking Mr. Doyle’s figures) definitely established by Mr. Trent’s death. There seemed no doubt that Mr. Archer and Major Ellicott, to say nothing of Cheryl, could easily prove that Mr. Trent had been opposed to such a gift. Which made his death extremely convenient. Not, of course, that I had the slightest interest in protecting Dr. Sartoris, or trying to conceal the fact that he . . . well, that he was nothing but a sort of super-gigolo with the pseudo-scientific patter of the modern Mumbo-Jumbo who lives in Vienna. Still, I didn’t want to be instrumental in hanging him.

  “Well?” he said.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” I replied.

  “Most women do,” he said. “Only they generally say what they’ve got to. say first. Well, let me know when you change it back again. Now I’m going to be busy. I ain’t hunting for a book, but if that one turns up let me know. Going to the funeral? “

  “I don’t know yet.”

  I thought it over when he’d gone, and eventually went up to Perry Bassett’s room. He was there.

  “I’ve got to talk to you a minute,” I said. He stood aside a little reluctantly for me to come in. His room was as astonishing, in its way, as anything in the house. Like Mrs. Trent’s, you could have told in a second whose room it was. So many things were scattered about that there was hardly room for the army cot in the corner. Bulbs and golf sticks, fishing tackle, catalogues, tobacco humidors, a stuffed white owl labeled “Jerry, 1910-1922,” cabinets with shells and pressed flowers under glass. There was a covered bird cage hanging in the window, with a bird chirping and hopping about.

  “You’d better sit down,” he said, and looked around helplessly. There was obviously no place to sit. He pushed a lot of miscellaneous trowels and pruning shears off one end of the army cot, and said, “There.”

  I sat down and told him I was rather worried about what I should do, and thought he could advise me.

  He looked genuinely alarmed, and very comical.

  “Oh, dear!” he murmured. He seemed to be looking around for some place to escape to. I went on hurriedly to tell him about his sister’s wanting me to arrange with the auctioneer to hold her bid above any offered for the Foster property the next day. He looked very puzzled.

  “What does she want with that?” he asked.

  “A sanatorium,” I said.

  “We don’t need a sanatorium.”

  “Dr. Sartoris seems to.”

  “Oh, dear!” he said fretfully. “I thought Duncan put an end to that. He said the day before all this happened, that Dr. Sartoris was not to have a penny of his money.”

  “But it’s Mrs. Trent’s money, now.”

  “All the better reason for being careful with it.”

  “Quite,” I said. “What do you think I should do?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” he answered wearily. “You’ll just have to think of something yourself. It’s her money, and when she gets a thing into her head it’s difficult to get it out. It’s such a silly way of doing things.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “And if I tell the auctioneer what she told me, there’s no reasonable limit to the amount they’ll stick her for it. Unless the auctioneer happens to be a plaster saint who doesn’t want to make money.”

  “You’re wrong there—he really does want to make money. And the Fosters are his cousins too.”

  “Then it’s absurd.”

  “I’ll tell you,” he said suddenly. “Just don’t you do anything at all about it. Say you forgot it. That’s what I do. I always forget things that are inconvenient to remember.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll do something like that.”

  I left him putting his tools back on the foot of the bed, looking rather more worried and more rabbit-like than ever.

  “You might go talk to my niece,” he called after me. “She knows what to do.”

  It was unfortunate, or fortunate, whichever way you look at these things, that I met Dr. Sartoris just then. He was crossing the hall towards Mrs. Trent’s sitting room, and when he saw me he came on.

  “I want to talk to you, Miss Gather,” he said, and I was pleased to find that I didn’t have any more of that business of my stomach, or whatever the seat of the emotions is, turning over with a sickening or thrilling plop. I met his gray calculating eyes quite calmly
, in fact, and said “Yes?”

  But he shook his head, and something of the old amused intriguing smile came back into his eyes.

  “No,” he said. “I thought I could count on you—but I can’t, can I?”

  I felt very like a beast, all of a sudden. But I said, “You certainly can, Dr. Sartoris. In fact, I’m going out pretty soon to buy you a sanatorium.”

  If I’d expected him to go into heroics of any sort, or even to act like Michael Spur, I was wrong. The smile at the corner of his mouth deepened, but it turned down, not up, and gave him an expression of amused helplessness. “But I don’t want a sanatorium, Miss Cather.”

  “You’re going to have one anyway,” I said. “I’m fully commissioned to pay whatever’s necessary to get it for you. When fully fixed up, according to Mr. Doyle, it ought to be worth sixty thousand dollars.”

  The smile left his face instantly. He was not looking either amused or helpless now. The thought occurred to me for the second time that he wouldn’t be a very good person to have seriously annoyed at you.

  “What do you mean, exactly?” he said.

  I told him what Mrs. Trent had told me, that I was to arrange with the auctioneer to get the place at any cost.

  “Miss Cather!” he said very seriously. “Mrs. Trent doesn’t realize what she’s doing. I couldn’t think of having anything to do with such an idea. Is it too much for me to ask you not to do this thing—for her sake . . . and mine?”

  Suddenly, before I knew exactly what I was doing, I said, “Dr. Sartoris, will you tell me why you came here last Monday?”

  He looked a little puzzled, and then amused, and I was furious at myself for having let him get his old hold over me again, by the simple trick of appealing to me as if I were important to him. Now he was confident again, and rather making fun of me for capitulating so abjectly.

  “Let me see,” he drawled, a twinkle in his fine eyes “I think somebody asked me to come. Why?”

  Having got that far I decided not to go back. I said: “I know. But who asked you? That’s what I want to know.”