The Clue of the Judas Tree

by Zenith Brown

  They arrested Michael Spur. Lieutenant Kelly ordered Dr. Sartoris, Mr. Archer, Perry Bassett and Dick Ellicott to go into the library and stay there until he sent for them, and he ordered me upstairs to stay with Cheryl. Dr. O’Brien had given her an opiate. She was lying on her bed white and still. A man came in, locked the bathroom door and looked in the closets. “I’ll be outside the door, miss,” he said, and went out. After a little he opened the door and Magothy came in with a pot of chocolate and some wafers, and set them down without a word. His face had the queer livid hue of the terrified darkey.

  I drank the chocolate, and my head seemed a little steadier. I knew now that there was someone in this house who was not sane, and that it was not Emily Trent. It could only be Michael Spur. No one else, I remembered, knew that he had ever used a spear as a bayonet. Cheryl had said she’d never told anyone. I thought I must ask her when she woke up. She moaned and turned slightly away from me, as if she were dreaming what I had thought.

  But where was Emily Trent going? She was dressed in a suit and hat and gloves. That question kept coming back into my mind, and I didn’t dare believe the only answer that seemed logical. Had Michael found her by accident, or had he known she would be there? What had happened to the men Lieutenant Kelly had put in the house to guard us from just this thing?

  I was sitting by Cheryl’s bed when the first gray streaks of dawn turned pink and gold, and I got up and put back the curtains. The dozen solutions of the Ivy Hill murders that had seemed so plausible when the sky was dark seemed grotesquely fantastic now that day had come. I came back to the bed and looked down at Cheryl. Her eyes were open. For a moment I thought she was dead, they were so fixed and staring. I touched her hand, and she closed it over mine.

  “I guess he did it, Louise,” she whispered. “I believe it, now.”

  I couldn’t say anything, try as I would.

  “Will they hang him?” she asked in the same soft whisper.

  I shook my head. They couldn’t.

  “They’ll say he’s insane,” she went on pitifully. “But he’s not, Victor will say so.”

  She closed her eyes. I rang for the maid. The policeman at the door put his head in.

  “Have them send us something—coffee,” I said. “And get Mr. Bassett.”

  Perry came. Cheryl rushed into his arms. When I went out he was smoothing her hair and saying, “There, there, little cherry blossom.”

  I got dressed and. went downstairs. Dick Ellicott was down, and Dr. Sartoris, both dressed. Mr. Archer was with Mr. Doyle, they said. And we had a rapid new development. Mr. Archer was furious at the arrest of Michael Spur—they had no evidence, he said. What had stunned Michael was his jump out his window. Lieutenant Kelly’s men had locked him in. When he heard the screams on the landing he had tried to get out, and when he couldn’t he had jumped out the window. His dressing gown had caught on an iron awning hook, and he had fallen and been badly shaken up.

  While we were standing there Lieutenant Kelly came in; he had several strands of black and white flannel in his hand.

  “All right as far as it goes,” he said grimly. “Looks like a straight story.”

  Burns, the man I’d found in a heap on the floor, had come around. His story was simple. Mrs. Trent had brought him a pink flask of what she said was pre-war stuff, and had told him to take it to help him stay awake—because she was so alarmed. He had not thought anything of it, and the sleepier he got the more he had drunk, until he felt himself slipping. He had tried to get downstairs to his mate on guard there. He had no notion of what time he had passed out.

  When the other came to, we got the same story from him, except that he had been presented with a decanter by Mrs. Trent.

  I was with Lieutenant Kelly when he went upstairs to Mrs. Trent’s room. When he opened the door I got my first glimpse of it since her death. Three bags were packed and set out in the middle of the room; her hand bag and a light coat of summer ermine were lying across the yellow chaise longue. In her fireplace there was a little heap of charred paper, and a young man was on his knees in front of it, carefully picking out the larger flakes.

  Lieutenant Kelly strode directly into Mrs. Trent’s bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. There was a pill box on a lower shelf. He read the label. It was dated the day before, and had Mrs. Trent’s name as the patient and Dr. Sartoris’s as the physician. I saw Lieutenant Kelly’s jaw tighten as he opened the box, but it was manifestly quite full. He scowled and put it back. Then he picked up an empty bottle, also issued to Mrs. Trent, and dated three days before—the day of Mr. Trent’s murder. I saw the words “Not to Be Refilled.” The doctor’s name on it was J. J. O’Brien. Lieutenant Kelly held the bottle carefully and removed the stopper. He smelled it, then moistened his tongue with a drop still remaining, and nodded with some satisfaction.

  He started to turn away when something else caught his eye. I looked too. There were two bottles of aspirin on the shelf, one half full, the other empty. Lieutenant Kelly scratched his head and scowled again. Then he carefully put the empty bottle by the aspirin bottles, took a roll of adhesive tape off the top shelf, closed the door and plastered it shut with the tape,

  “I don’t want anybody in there just yet a while,” he said.

  When we went back into the bedroom the man at the fireplace looked up.

  “Parks says they’ve got some stuff down there,” he said. “They went through the doctor’s room with a fine-tooth comb—nothing doing.”

  My heart sank very stupidly. I went along with Lieutenant Kelly. I felt, and I dare say I looked, as if I were tagging him around, but I wanted to ask him about Michael Spur and he didn’t give me a chance. He looked too grim and formidable, and I knew he was desperately worried. I don’t know where he ever got so many men all of a sudden as seemed to be around, taking pictures and doing other things in a perfectly matter-of-fact routine way.

  Two men were in the hall whom I’d seen the day before. One of them had a canvas bag, and he said “Here you are, chief.” They put it down on the floor and opened it. It was a rather soggy mass of papers and miscellaneous objects, and I recognized one of them at once. It was the carpet-covered brick I’d seen at Mr. Doyle’s museum. There were a couple of revolvers there too, one of them of a rather unusual shape, and I thought I recognized it too. I glanced at Lieutenant Kelly.

  “Where’d you find it?” he said.

  “Under the bridge, the little one,” said one of the men. “Guess they got away with the liquor.”

  “Take it away,” said Lieutenant Kelly. I very brightly halted their going by saying, “But where’s the other gun? Michael Spur’s gun.”

  Lieutenant Kelly turned and glowered at me through his white stubby eyelashes. He hesitated a moment. Then he said curtly, “I got hold of that before the burglary. You boys give that stuff to Doyle. Get going.”

  I stepped back, feeling a little miffed. Lieutenant Kelly’s manner had been rather short, and my nerves were decidedly ragged. I stepped on somebody’s foot and turned quickly and said, “I’m sorry!”

  I saw Perry Bassett standing there just behind me, looking very blank. He nodded absently at me and said, “Lieutenant Kelly, has anyone found my sister’s will? “

  “What’s that?” Lieutenant Kelly said very quickly. “Your sister had a will?”

  “Yes,” said Perry timidly. “She made a will. Mr. Archer will tell you.”

  Lieutenant Kelly raised his head like an old fire horse at the sound of the bell.

  “Mr. Archer!” he shouted, and Mr. Archer came out of the living room.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “What’s this about that will?”

  Mr. Archer nodded. “It’s quite simple,” he said. “I have it.”

  He took a folded piece of legal-looking paper out of his pocket and read it, all of us standing there open-mouthed, listening. The provisions were simple, as he had said. Emily Trent willed and bequeathed her brother Perry Bassett $10,-000 cash an
d a return ticket to New York. The rest of her property, real and personal, she bequeathed entirely to her lawfully wedded husband. That was all there was to it.

  Mr. Archer stopped and looked at Lieutenant Kelly.

  Lieutenant Kelly ran his distracted fingers through his crisp white curly hair. “Well, I’m damned” he said. “The woman’s husband was dead!”

  I glanced involuntarily at Dr. Sartoris, and I noticed that everyone else had done the same. He shook his head and smiled. “There’s some mistake, gentlemen,” he said.

  If there’s a destiny that shapes our ends, it was certainly getting in some first-rate licks that morning. The words had barely left Dr. Sartoris’s mouth when I heard the tinkle-tinkle of a bicycle bell, and saw a messenger boy put on his brakes and hop nimbly off onto the porch. He took off his hat and pulled out an oblong yellow envelope.

  “Mr. Archer, sir,” he said.

  We all stood silently watching Mr. Archer sign his name in the small book. The boy saluted and rode off. Mr. Archer’s hands shook a little as he tore open the envelope. He read the telegram. His face suddenly went purplish-red and he gave a very violent snort indeed, and handed the telegram over to Lieutenant Kelly. I looked around his shoulder and read it. It was, on the whole, the most amazing telegram I’ve ever seen.

  THIS IS TO TELL YOU THAT I HAVE AT LAST FOUND PERFECT HAPPINESS STOP WHEN YOU GET THIS VICTOR AND I WILL BE MAN AND WIFE STOP YOU HAVE ALWAYS HATED ME TOM BUT I FORGIVE YOU STOP TRY AND RETURN THE MONEY YOU STOLE FROM MICHAEL SPUR STOP WE CAN NEVER BE COMPLETE TILL WE LOSE OUR LIBIDOS IN THE ULTIMATE STOP TELL LOUISE MATHER TO STAY WITH CHERYL STOP THE GUEST TOWELS ARE IN A HUTZLER BOX IN THE THIRD FLOOR LINEN CLOSET STOP TELL CHERYL AND PLEASE SEE YOURSELF THAT PERRY DONT GO OUT WITHOUT HIS HAT STOP HE WILL GET SUN STRUCK STOP I HAVE PLENTY OF MONEY STOP

  It was signed “Emily Sartoris.”

  The silence in the hall was so dense that it was simply deafening. I had the most overwhelming and insane desire to giggle. Mr. Doyle broke the silence. He said, “Sorry, Kelly, but you’ll have to arrest the doctor.”

  I don’t know what happened after that. I was so stunned that I went up to my room and sat down, and smoked ten cigarettes, one after another.

  I sat there thinking it over, and realizing that I should have known it from the beginning. A man who had been chief of police in Washington once told me that ninety-five per cent of all crimes are very simple and easily solved. Only five per cent are even mysteries—like the Phantom Murderer who kept shooting people down on the streets, apparently without the slightest motive. But find your motive, he said, and you’ve got the five per cent too.

  Dr. Sartoris’s motive was simplicity itself. Mrs. Trent was giving him money for his hospital, and Mr. Trent had put his foot down. How long he had worked on Mrs. Trent with his story of Michael Spur I didn’t know. Mrs. Trent had said it was Agnes who had brought them together. It was simple to kill Duncan Trent, possibly with Agnes’s help, and then put Michael Spur, for doing it, in the hospital that Duncan Trent’s money would then build. Then Agnes—by the evidence of her own lips, from her own statement to me—welshed; and Lieutenant Kelly had seen the significance of the branch of Judas Tree in her dead clenched hand.

  From that point on too, it was all clear. Mrs. Trent had made her will leaving the property to him, and he had finished his game with a master stroke. Only, he had not given Mrs. Trent credit for being as crafty—or as stupid—as she was. She had so arranged it that as long as he wasn’t her husband, he didn’t get her money. He probably had no way of knowing that; he had probably thought that the papers he’d burned in her fireplace were all that remained to incriminate him. He could never have thought of her final dramatic touch of the telegram to Mr. Archer.

  I supposed they couldn’t make men as marvelous-looking as Dr. Sartoris without there being some flaw in the golden bowl. Then I stopped short: golden bowl seemed to bring something to me. Dr. Sartoris had not got the money by her will—but I wondered . . .? I sat there thinking untü my cigarette burned close to my fingers and brought me sharply to my senses.

  Mrs. Trent was murdered not far from the landing of the stairway leading to the family wing.

  With the suddenness of a miraculous vision I recalled her standing there, talking to me, and her strange laugh when she’d said that the suit of armor on the landing was worth more than anything in the house. I remembered her wire and its last sentence: “I have plenty of money.”

  It all came to me in a flash, and without thinking in the least of Lieutenant Kelly’s warning, I slipped out into the hall. No one was in sight. I didn’t know where they had taken Michael Spur, or even if they’d released him now that they had arrested Dr. Sartoris. I went quickly down the heavily carpeted hall to the staircase just outside Cheryl’s door. The guard had gone from there too. A heavy rope had been hastily tied across the top step, to keep people from using the stairs; but the landing was empty, except for the shining figure with the gay pink plume in his helmet, and his empty fist stretched out before him. The photographers had come and gone, and with them the fingerprint men. There was a dark splotch on the lower step where Emily Trent had fallen.

  I glanced over my shoulder at Dr. Sartoris’s door at the end of the vertical hallway, and slipped under the rope and down the stairs, avoiding the dark splotch on the carpet.

  The landing was about ten feet wide and twenty long. The knight in armor stood on his low mahogany pedestal off the rug in the corner across from me. I looked down the lower staircase. The doors were open, but no one was in sight and there was no sound.

  I touched the armor gingerly. I hadn’t the faintest notion how one got inside the thing. Finally I discovered a lace, and my fingers trembled nervously whüe I untied it and moved the breastplate enough to put my hand inside. That didn’t help much—there was a shirt of chain mail under it. “Pierce both plate and mail” kept running through my head, and half my mind was trying to remember where I’d read that, and the other half trying to pull the thing aside. Then I felt something lodged tightly in between the back plate and the breastplate, and as Î moved the breastplate with my arm I felt it give a little. It seemed to be a box.

  My heart was beating like a trip hammer; and just then I heard a sound. I looked frantically up and down the stairs, but no one was in sight.

  I had hold of the box by now; and simply making myself work slowly and carefully instead of just yanking desperately at the thing, I got it down, and finally, by pushing up the mail shirt, I pulled the box out into the space between the steel plates. Then I saw what I had, and my heart suddenly gave a sickening plop. It wasn’t a box full of Mrs. Trent’s money. It was Agnes Hutton’s large calf-bound copy of the Droll Tales of Balzac in French.

  I was just holding it in my hand and looking stupidly at it, as one does something one’s been handed and doesn’t know just what to do with. And then I opened it, quite unconsciously, as I would any book—and stood perfectly aghast. It wasn’t a book at all, or rather it wasn’t a book any longer. Its leaves had been glued together and hollowed to make a cigarette box out of it. There was the fly-leaf, the title-page and half a dozen pages of the text, and then a white sheet of paper that had been pressed tightly down to keep something underneath tightly in place. It was a letter, not folded but pressed in full length, and at the head I saw the name of a well-known Baltimore bank. It was addressed to Mr. Trent, and dated the Saturday before his death. My eyes swept quickly down the typed sheet.

  “This is to inform you,” it said, “that your name has been forwarded to the United States Treasury in compliance with the orders of the Treasurer of the United States, as one of our clients who has received gold and gold certificates within the last two years. We have informed the Treasury that you have received $200,000 in gold certificates. We wish you to understand that” we are acting in accordance with orders received from the United States Treasury Department, and that we have no choice in the matter.”

  Fascinated, I lif
ted the edge of the letter, and saw beneath it a tightly compressed pile of yellow bills. I saw the “1000” on the top one. And then I heard a sound, this time unmistakable, and looked up. It was Perry Bassett. He was coming out of Cheryl’s room, and I started to say, “Look, Perry, what I’ve found!” when something in the way he was moving stopped the words on my lips, and the wild insane glitter in his gentle brown rabbit’s eyes literally froze me in my tracks.

  “Drop that book, Louise Gather,” he whispered intently. “Drop it! Drop it this minute!”

  They say a drowning man lives over a complete finite stretch of his life as he sinks into infinity. In the moment that I stood there, powerless to move, with Perry Bassett creeping towards me with a living devil in his eyes, one gnarled hand pointing down at me, the whole mystery of Ivy Hill dropped into place at last, like the last miraculous piece of some jigsaw puzzle.

  Mild little Perry Bassett, with his two passions: his niece and his gambling. Both taken away from him; his niece forced to marry Dick Ellicott, himself forced to potter about with plants and flowers when he knew he could make a fortune in Wall Street if they’d only let him. In my hands, between the calf-covered boards of an old book, lay everything he dreamed of or could hope for. Both he and Mrs. Trent had known the book was not a book at all, but a box to hold something that Agnes Hutton had not let out of her hands. Perry had seen her with it and had followed her that morning, not knowing she had left it behind. It was his rope that had hanged her. Everything had pointed to him so plainly—but he was so gentle and so sweet.

  He was coming towards me now . . . to get the book that his sister had recognized on Agnes Hutton’s table. The whole thing flashed clearly into my mind, in perfect form and harmony. It was after that that she had made her plans to buy the Foster place and to buy Dr. Sartoris. Perry had guessed it; he knew her. No wonder he was kneeling by the prostrate guard in front of Michael’s door saying “He’s been drinking”—when his sister was lying on the stairs dead.