The Clue of the Judas Tree

by Zenith Brown

  “Oh, that will be all right. Victor will certify that he’s quite insane.”

  Victor looked a little startled, I thought, but he should have recovered instantly under the icy shower of Mr. Archer’s remark that it took three doctors to certify in the state of Maryland and they had to have Maryland licenses.

  Major Ellicott stepped into the breach.

  “I’m sure Miss Cather would like to see your museum, Doyle,” he said. “Cheryl and 1 might run her into town after dinner and have a look at it.”

  He turned to me,

  “You haven’t been off the place since you came, have you?”

  “I think it would be a very good plan for all you young people to go to town and go to a movie,” said Mrs. Trent.

  There was a silence. Not even Mr. Archer seemed to think of anything to say. Then Cheryl spoke. “I’m sorry, mother,” she said. “I don’t feel like going to a movie tonight. I think it would be very nice for Dick to take Louise to town.”

  I would rather have waited to see Mr. Doyle’s museum, granting I had to see it some time. But Mr. Doyle wouldn’t hear of it. The idea of having his museum “written up” seemed to have got hold of him. I tried, but unsuccessfully, to explain that I had very little to do with what Mr. Mc-Crae decided to publish.

  And that explains why I was standing in the door with a black velvet jacket on, waiting for Major Ellicott to see something about his car, when Lieutenant Kelly came downstairs. He looked pretty near fagged out. I gathered that he hadn’t had a particularly successful day.

  Going somewhere?” he inquired, touching my jacket sleeve.

  “Going to town to see Mr. Doyle’s crime museum,” I said. Then I added, rather annoyingly, “I’m sorry I can’t wait until he’s added the other gun and the piece of rope. Which I understand is to be done as soon as Michael Spur is put in a sanatorium.”

  “I ain’t so sure that’s what I’d call it,” he said dryly.

  I gasped at that.

  “You don’t mean you think Michael killed Agnes Hutton?” I demanded.

  “I don’t know what I mean, lady.”

  He ambled off just as Major Ellicott came into sight driving a Buick roadster. He got out and said, “Half a minute while I find Kelly.”

  “He’s just gone into the library,” I told him.

  I had half expected Lieutenant Kelly to put a stop to our leaving. He didn’t, not even when Mr. Archer decided he’d go with us. Mrs. Trent remarked, very audibly, that she hoped he’d plan to stay when he got there.

  We started, Mr. Archer very red with annoyance.

  “I sometimes wonder why I put up with that woman,” he spluttered, mopping his pink brow. “If it weren’t for Cheryl, I’d throw up the sponge, I declare I would!”

  I was rather crowded over against Major Ellicott, and I caught a glimpse of his dark face in the mirror over the windshield. He had an amused smile on his face.

  “I suppose you nipped the Foster business in the bud,” he remarked.

  Mr. Archer grunted apoplectically. “I had that out with her on the way home this afternoon,” he said. “I don’t want to hear it even mentioned again. But I must say,” he added reluctantly, “she was more reasonable about it than I expected.”

  “That’s because Dr. Sartoris refuses to accept it if she does buy it,” I put in. I might as well have thrown a bunch of red poppies at a bull.

  “What’s that?” Mr. Archer demanded angrily. I told him what Dr. Sartoris had said to me. He blew his nose violently.

  “So that’s it,” he said. “He thinks he’ll get a hundred and fifty thousand out of her anyway? That’s probably where-”

  He stopped short, or perhaps it was Major Ellicott’s sharp turn of the car that shook him into silence. He spent the rest of the trip fuming to himself. We dropped him at the post office, promised to pick him up at the home of a local bank president on our way back, and continued around Church Circle to Mr. Doyle’s office at the top of Main Street.

  Mr. Doyle was already there. He’d left immediately after dinner and his display was already spread out in fine style. I must say there’s always something curiously unreal and sentimental to me about crime relics. The door stopper with which the sixteen-year-old colored boy had brained his grandmother (aged seventy-five) for the $2.35 she had in the old purse around her knee was nothing but a brick covered with a torn piece of old turkey carpet. It had a brown stain on one end of it, and it had sent a boy to the Cut for life. And Mr. Doyle showed me a blue steel automatic labeled “State of Maryland vs. Michael Spur, August 18, 1919,” and a bullet in a sealed glass box labeled the same way. It was just a gun and the spent bullet was nothing but a piece of blunted lead—and yet there on Mr. Doyle’s desk, with Major Ellicott and Mr. Doyle and me bending over it, lay the thing that had destroyed two men, a father and a son.

  The State’s Attorney had that curious mania for publicity and being “written up” that you find among so many otherwise sensible people. He gave me a lot of pictures of himself at various peaks of his career, and somewhere I still have a list of his vital statistics. I was rather glad when Dick Ellicott took me by the arm and said, “Look here, Louise, you’re not going to keep me here all night.”

  We got out, and I’m ashamed to say we went to a movie across from the State House and had a very pleasant evening. I forgot all about Dr. Sartoris—and from a number of little things that happened I rather think Dick Ellicott forgot all about Cheryl. At least when we called for Mr. Archer somewhere, and were told he’d decided to spend the night in town, Dick Ellicott grinned at me and said, “I’m glad—I like to talk to you,” and I don’t quite remember whether it was my knee or my wrist he squeezed by way of punctuation. Anyway, we got on very well, until he said, “You know, Cheryl and I are going to be married shortly.”

  I said, “Yes, I know.”

  “Well, do you know that for the last week I haven’t been very sure that it was the wisest thing to do?”

  “For you or Cheryl?”

  “Both,” he said. “There’s seventeen years’ difference in age, for one thing.”

  “Have you just discovered that?”

  “I’ve just been thinking about it. And . . . well, honestly, she seems different the last week or so, somehow. I don’t know whether it’s all this awful business that’s changed her, or what. She’s just not the same.”

  “That’s natural enough,” I said.

  “I guess so. Do you think she’s crazy about this fellow Sartoris—the way Emily is, and the way Agnes Hutton was?”

  “That’s a quaint idea,” I said. “I shouldn’t have thought of it.”

  “Maybe you wouldn’t,” he said, giving me a queer look. “But maybe you haven’t any idea of the number of times I’ve run across them in the summer house behind the lilac grove. In fact, that’s where they were the night Duncan was murdered.”

  “How do you know?” I said quickly, still not quite clear in my mind as to what he meant.

  “I saw them there at half-past one. He was standing up talking and she was sitting with her feet tip on the chair with her arms around her knees listening to him.”

  “On Monday night—the night Mr. Trent was shot?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What were they talking about?”

  “I didn’t hear.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I suppose that explains why neither of them heard the shot.”

  “Probably.”

  “But it doesn’t explain,” I continued, “why you and Perry and Agnes didn’t, does it?”

  “Or Emily, or Michael Spur, or Archer.”

  “Mr. Archer’s a little deaf, isn’t he?”

  “That’s right,” Major Ellicott admitted. “He’s the only one that’s got a decent excuse,”

  “Mrs. Trent too,” I said. “She had a mud pack on her face.”

  And then suddenly the car sputtered, faltered, and came to a dead stop. I looked
at Major Ellicott. He was swearing softly but with considerable feeling.

  “Ignition?” I asked. “Battery? Carburetor?”

  “Empty gas tank,” he said curtly. “I told that damn nigger to fill her up this morning. We’ve got a thousand gallon tank on the place and this has happened twice to me this year.”

  There’s something perfectly futile about an automobile with no gas in it. We sat there a moment.

  “How far is it?” I asked.

  “About two miles. And it looks like rain. Mind?”

  “No,” I said. But I really did a lot. Two miles in the rain in high-heeled slippers, with a blistered heel from two miles in riding boots, is a long way, especially on country roads.

  We started, but we didn’t get far. A car came up behind us and stopped by the side of the road. I laughed heartily. The men in it were Lieutenant Kelly’s. I understood why he’d been so willing for us to go to town, and I wondered if they knew we’d left Mr. Archer behind.

  They were rather apologetic about getting caught, as it were, and explained that they’d have been closer to us but they stayed to see the end of the comedy and we left in the middle. However, they gave us a lift to the house.

  As we were going in Lieutenant Kelly and Dr. Sartoris came out of the library. Lieutenant Kelly looked at his watch and strode out into the drive just as his men were parking the car. “Run me into town,” he said, and I heard them rattling off in the police car.

  Dr. Sartoris looked at me and smiled faintly.

  “Did you have a nice time looking at Mr. Doyle’s relics?” he asked.

  “Very,” I said.

  Mrs. Trent pounced out from the living room.

  “Oh, Victor, is that you! My dear, I thought that dreadful man was going to keep you all night. You were in there almost two hours talking to him—and poor little me all alone with Perry and Cheryl.”

  “You should have gone with us, Cheryl,” Major Ellicott said, sauntering into the living room as I went in.

  “Oh, hullo, Michael. How’s the boy?”

  “I’m all right, thanks. Has Kelly gone? I want to see him.”

  “He’s just gone.”

  “Oh, damn him,” said Michael bitterly. “I told him I was waiting for him.”

  His hands moved nervously through his hair, and I looked at him almost in alarm. He seemed terribly on edge.

  Just then Dr. Sartoris came in from the hall with Mrs. Trent clinging to his arm, and Michael glared at them.

  “For God’s sake, Aunt Emily, can’t you quit hanging onto that fellow—at least till your husband gets cold in his grave?”

  There was an appalled silence—on my part at least.

  Then Michael thrust back his forelock with a savage movement, and said, “Oh, I’m sorry, Aunt Emily. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  He cast a penitent glance at Cheryl and strode rapidly out of the room.

  “Well, I declare!” Mrs. Trent gasped.

  Cheryl, who was still sitting at the bridge table with Perry Bassett, twisted one corner of her red mouth in a sardonic half smile. “Buck up, mother,” she said dryly, getting up. “Let’s take a walk, Perry. I need a little air.”

  Perry Bassett disengaged his legs from the legs of the card table and his chair and said he’d like to. But Cheryl turned back from the opened window.

  “I guess we can’t escape that way,” she said; “it’s raining again.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The inquest on the body of Agnes Hutton was held the next morning. Dick Ellicott and I were the only people going from Ivy Hill, except Lieutenant Kelly, who had come back out some time the night before, and appeared, all barber-shaved and powdered and polished up and ready to go, before I’d begun my breakfast. He decided that because Major Ellicott’s car was stuck gasless out on the road the three of us would go out in the police car and take some gas with us, and Dick Ellicott could drive us into town. There was some rumor that Mrs. Trent had ordered her car brought around at eleven o’clock, and he didn’t want the police car to be away—apparently just in case.

  I hadn’t seen Cheryl to talk to, although I knew she and Perry and Michael had gone out before breakfast and hadn’t returned by the time we started. I wondered if she was still planning to marry Dick Ellicott that day. I figured, however, that she couldn’t marry him as long as he was with Lieutenant Kelly and me, and something might come up to give her back her courage. Dr. Sartoris, who was making short work of a large flurry pile of flannel cakes and honey at the other end of the table, said he was happy to say Michael was better this morning. Not as overwrought as he had been last night. Lieutenant Kelly, who ate with us when Mrs. Trent wasn’t down, said “Yeh?”—and that finished that.

  When we left Dr. Sartoris was standing in the drive. It may have been my imagination entirely that gave him the air of a man speeding an inopportune parting guest before he went back to his own affairs. Anyway, we drove off, and found Major Dick’s car. Lieutenant Kelly unscrewed the cap of the gas tank and Dick Ellicott emptied a gallon tin into it.

  “That’ll take us fourteen miles,” he remarked, and put the tin back in the police car.

  It was rather a tight squeeze. Lieutenant Kelly said he thought I ought to reduce, and laughed heartily. Major Ellicott entered into the spirit of the thing and computed our combined weight at five hundred and thirty-five pounds. My hundred and thirty was rather overpowered in the middle, and I got awfully mixed up with the gears and brakes and things when Dick Ellicott started the motor, turned off the windshield wiper, shifted in my opinion a lot oftener than was necessary, and drove us into town. We stopped at a service station at the end of the bridge, and while the man was filling the tank Lieutenant Kelly went in the shop to telephone. He brought me out a package of gum.

  The inquest was brief and most perfunctory. The sheriff was present, and explained that Lieutenant J. J. Kelly of the Baltimore Bureau of Detectives was Special Investigator in charge, and then retired to a side table, where he struggled audibly with what I should imagine was a hollow tooth. Dick and I were the only witnesses immediately connected with the Ivy Hill family. We told about finding the bodies, and the jury immediately returned a verdict of murder by persons unknown, and were dismissed by Dr. O’Brien. Lieutenant Kelly later told me that he’d pulled a fast one to keep them from hanging the whole works on Michael Spur from the drop of the flag. He didn’t say what the fast one was.

  After that there was a sudden relaxing in the room. Lieutenant Kelly and the other out-of-town people present—they included a dozen or so reporters from Baltimore and Washington—gathered around the sheriff, and there was a lot of heavy humor indulged in. I didn’t know what the joke was, but it was obviously on the sheriff; and then we were told by a young chap standing by us that Mr. Doyle’s office had been burgled the night before and four half-gallon jars of ten-year-old evidence, and some other truck, carted off. As it was one of the few burglaries the town had ever had for years, it was funny in itself, but I gathered that to have the police burgled was of course immensely more so.

  As we were going out I was surprised to see Mr. Archer. I hadn’t noticed him come in. He nodded to me and drew Dick Ellicott off to one side. Lieutenant Kelly, seeing me standing there, came over and asked me if I’d like to see Mr. Doyle’s museum in its present state. I said I would, very much. He ambled over leisurely and shook hands with Mr. Archer.

  “I was goin’ to look you up this morning,” he said. “One of my men traced a safe deposit box of Mr, Trent’s. Under the name of Harrington.”

  “Yes?” said Mr. Archer curtly.

  “Well, he found it. And it was empty. Nothing in it.”

  “Empty?” said Mr. Archer. The color faded suddenly out of his face, and left it the color of dirty putty.

  “Yeh,” said Lieutenant Kelly placidly. “Empty.” He added as he turned away, “Thought I’d tell you. Thought you might like to run uptown this morning and have a look.”

  Mr. Archer’s l
ips closed firmly. I saw that he was a man of good stuff; the color came back into his face.

  “I’ll go now,” he said.

  Lieutenant Kelly followed him a few paces, telling him whom to see in Baltimore.

  Dick Ellicott said, “The old “fellow seemed pretty shaken for a minute.”

  I nodded

  “I’ll bet he wishes Agnes Hutton was here.”

  “Why?”

  “She knew more about the Trent and Spur affairs than anybody in the place. I guess they thought sometimes she knew too much.”

  Lieutenant Kelly came back just then and told Dick he was going down to Mr. Doyle’s office for a few moments and that I was going with him.

  “Then I’ll come along,” Dick said.

  The sight of Mr. Doyle’s office, still pretty much the way his visitor had left it, seemed to give Lieutenant Kelly a good deal of quiet fun. The cabinet that had held the museum was practically empty, and the large file that had held the four jars of ten-year-old evidence was entirely so. Papers were dumped about, and Mr. Doyle’s secretary, whose name was Miss Lacey, was a very worried woman.

  “It’s the Ridge Beach papers I can’t find,” she said. “We’ve got to have them.”

  Lieutenant Kelly nodded affably, and when Miss Lacey went out of the room he winked at me.

  “This’ll keep the Big Shot busy for a month. Won’t have so much time to pleasure himself around Ivy Hill.”

  He chuckled gorgeously, and I looked severely at him.

  “Did you do this yourself?” I demanded in a whisper; but Miss Lacey was coming back, and Lieutenant Kelly remarked blandly, without any apparent relevance that I could see, “There’s more ways of killing a horse than choking him on butter.”

  When we went out and got into Dick Ellicott’s car he still seemed very well pleased with himself. We stopped at a drug store on the Circle, and while Dick Ellicott was inside I accused him again of resorting to very low methods to get rid of Mr. Doyle. Not that I blamed him much. Mr. Doyle was certainly on the side of what Mrs. Trent called “managing things.” But Lieutenant Kelly was not to be drawn.