The Clue of the Judas Tree

by Zenith Brown

  Perry Bassett was half-way down the stairs, whispering something frantically. Then only the dark wet patch where Mrs. Trent’s blood had soaked into the carpet, and the twenty feet of the landing, separated us; and I clutched the book tightly and tore myself away, and ran for my life down the stairs. He was running after me. I got over the rope at the foot of the stairs. I must get to Lieutenant Kelly, I thought desperately. The house was wide open, no one was in sight. I dashed through the door into the drive, and stopped for one frantic moment, not knowing which way to go. Then as I looked wildly about I saw a broad back going down the walk toward the garages, and my heart leaped, and I tried to call out for help. It was Dick Ellicott. He didn’t hear me, and I started to run towards him.

  I heard Perry Bassett behind me then. “Drop it!” he was crying, “drop it, Louise Gather!” And Ï ran on. “Dick!” I called. “Oh, Dick!” But he hurried on, and I realized that my voice was not making any sound but a choking gasp. I ran faster. I could hear Perry’s feet pounding on the drive behind me—and then Dick Ellicott turned suddenly around, and I heard Perry stop. I turned quickly. He was running back into the house. I ran on.

  Dick Ellicott was standing just outside the garage door.

  “For God’s sake, what is it, Louise?” he said.

  “Oh, take it!” I said, and I thrust the book at him.

  He took it without a word, and looked stupidly at it for a second, and I looked at him. His face was very white, and there was a light in his eyes that Fve never seen in anyone’s before or since.

  Then he laughed suddenly.

  “Thanks, Louise!” he said. “I’ve killed three people to get this”

  He slipped the book suddenly under his left arm, his hand went into his pocket and out, and I saw the blue-black revolver in it.

  “I like you,” he said. “I don’t want to kill you too. Will you stay there for five minutes? Promise?”

  I nodded dumbly, petrified with terror.

  He gave me a quick smile and dashed into the garage. I heard the starter whir and stop, whir again, whir and stop, and I heard the pounding of heavy feet behind me and turned to see Lieutenant Kelly running desperately up the drive, with other men behind him. And then I heard the starter whir and stop and Dick Ellicott curse; and then he came out of the garage door and stopped, looking at Lieutenant Kelly. The blue-black revolver was still in his hand.

  Lieutenant Kelly walked slowly towards him.

  “Give up, Ellicott,” he said quietly. “Put that gun down. You can’t get away.”

  Dick Ellicott looked at him silently.

  Then he said, “I imagine you’re right.”

  He looked at me with the same quick smile, stood there white-faced and erect for an instant, and raised the revolver to his head.

  I closed my eyes, but I heard the shot, and I heard Dick Ellicott fall.

  Someone touched my arm, and Perry Bassett’s voice, plaintive and very worried, said, “I don’t think you ought to stay out here any longer, Louise.”

  “Take her in the house,” Lieutenant Kelly said gruffly.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I took the news to Cheryl. She was sitting in front of a card table, automatically putting pieces of colored wood together to finish the picture of Washington Crossing the Delaware. I think she was still too stunned to know just what she was doing. Her eyes were wide and serious, and I noticed that her fingers trembled as she picked up the pieces of her puzzle and tried to put them in places they couldn’t possibly go in.

  “It’s all over, Cheryl,” I said in as matter-of-fact a voice as I could manage. “Over?”

  “Yes. It was Major Ellicott, Cheryl. And he’s shot himself.”

  She looked at me as if she hadn’t really heard me. And then she nodded.

  “That’s what Perry thought,” she said. “He told me so this morning.”

  “Perry?”

  “Yes. He said it had to be Mother or Mr. Archer or himself or Dick. It had to be somebody that knew all about the other time, when Michael killed his father. I guess we both thought it was Mother and Dr. Sartoris, until last night. I know I did. Where is Dick? “

  “He shot himself,” I repeated.

  “I’m glad,” she said. She went on dully picking up pieces of her puzzle.

  “I’ve got to do something, Louise, or I’ll go crazy,” she whispered pitifully.

  I drew up another chair and we sat there in silence, fitting together the prow of a wave-tossed boat. I had the curious feeling that Cheryl and I were doing in odd-shaped pieces of painted wood what Lieutenant Kelly had been doing downstairs in the purple pieces of the life-stuff of the people of Ivy Hill.

  When Cheryl spoke it was about her mother.

  “Poor dear,” she said. “She didn’t understand. I talked to Victor about it, the night Dad . . . died. He was worried, because somebody had wired him to come, and Mother denied she’d done it. He was afraid she was losing her mind. I guess he thought she’d shot my father. That’s why he wanted to get away. I tried to talk to Mother, and so did Perry, and she was all right until Agnes died. Then there was no holding her.”

  I told her about the money then. I’d forgotten it before. The other thing seemed so much more important.

  She nodded.

  “Perry thought something like that explained why Agnes sneaked away, and why Mother was so sure of herself all of a sudden—and why Lieutenant Kelly was here, too.”

  All that became clearer late that same afternoon. Perry persuaded Cheryl to take her puzzle downstairs. Dr. Sartoris seemed to feel that it had a definite therapeutic value. He said they used them in children’s hospitals in psychotherapy. Michael was in the living room when she came in, perfectly poised and as white as the dogwood petals that Magothy had put in a deep jade bowl on the center table. A little smile moved in the blue depths of her eyes. I went outside.

  Dr. Sartoris was lounging in a wicker chair on the terrace, gazing down the long garden towards the bay, where a white-sailed catboat moved lazily across the horizon. He looked up and smiled. I sat down wearily. Neither of us said anything.

  After a little Mr. Archer came out.

  “Lieutenant Kelly has something to say to you people,” he said, and we got up and went inside.

  Michael was sitting across the card table from Cheryl. They seemed to have got as far as the bandaged head of one of the rowers. When Lieutenant Kelly came in, looking very serious and badly in need of sleep and a shave, Cheryl looked up listlessly and rested her hands on the middle of the puzzle. Perry Bassett moved his chair closer to hers. She gave him a fleeting grateful smile.

  “I ain’t going to say very much,” Lieutenant Kelly said. “I just want to clear up a few things. The only people that know the real truth about all this are dead. But Major Ellicott killed Mr. Trent because Mr. Trent knew something about him and was going to tell it. I’ll get to that later on. And he killed Agnes Hutton because she knew he’d killed Trent, and she was going to squeal. He didn’t know she had the money when he did it, is my guess. The only person he killed on account of that $200,000 was Mrs. Trent. He guessed about the money when he heard the safe deposit box was empty, and he knew it when Mrs. Trent was so cocksure about herself. And when Mrs. Trent pulled a fast one and doped my men, with a bottle of whiskey that she’d put sleeping stuff plus aspirin in, and made first-class knockout drops of, then she gave him his chance.

  “She was planning to elope that night, and Ellicott got her when she was making a getaway, expecting to meet the doctor here in the garage. Well, I was watching Ellicott. I had one first-rate piece of evidence against him, but I didn’t have what you could call a motive as strong’s I had against half a dozen other people.”

  He glanced around, and I noticed that Mr, Archer had slipped quietly out of the room.

  “For instance,” he went on, “I guess there ain’t no use trying to pretend that Mr. Archer wasn’t mixed up in some pretty shady business about Michael Spur’s money. But tha
t ain’t my business. That’s up to Mr. Spur and Mr. Doyle.”

  Michael Spur spoke up quietly.

  “Mr. Archer and I have decided to fix up the business again, lieutenant. So I guess that’s all right.” Lieutenant Kelly nodded.

  “O.K. with me,” he said. “And I guess Mr. Doyle won’t be hurt. Well, now. Mr. Archer had plenty of reason for getting rid of Mr. Trent. Trent had all the money. Archer knew all about the business of Michael Spur twelve years ago. Agnes Hutton knew all about that, and all about the business juggling—and I figured, when she took the rap, that Archer might have just stopped her because she knew too much.

  “Well, if anybody’d told me the whole truth, I might have got onto it sooner. For instance, if Miss Cather heard that shot, there wasn’t no living reason why everybody else shouldn’t have heard it—except Michael Spur. He’d had a drink or two, and if the whiskey in this house ain’t a nightcap it ain’t nothing. I guess Ellicott fixed it up for him—because he had to be kept quiet. That was just sense.

  “So, what’s the answer? The answer is, everybody else did hear it—and they thought they’d just better keep their mouths shut. Then, Miss Trent and Dr. Sartoris were out in the garden. The gardener said he cleaned up there around seven, and the two of ’em were in sight until twelve—and there were a dozen cigarette butts out there. The doc finally told me about it. Then, somebody was in the library between the time Miss Cather ran through it, when Mr. Bassett turned off the light, and the time Bassett and Ellicott came down, it’s my guess that was Hutton. I know she came down afterwards, got the keys out of the drawer where Archer’d put ’em, thinking it was Spur had done it as a gift from God for him, and got everything she wanted, including that little package of two hundred thousand in gold certificates. So then, she saw a way she could slip outa the whole business. She was too thick with Ellicott; maybe she planned to double-cross him from the beginning.

  “She knew about it, all the time—she’d got Spur to come here, and she lined up the doctor on the job with his psychology. She hadn’t counted on Miss Cather showing up and always getting in the way. She and Ellicott were playing for big stakes—but the stakes didn’t happen to be the same. She was after the money. He was saving his own neck and she knew it. And that’s why Duncan Trent was killed and why Agnes Hutton was killed, and Mrs. Trent was killed just because she happened to get hold of the money.”

  He looked around. I’d heard a car drive up, and Magothy was waiting in the door with a package. Lieutenant Kelly nodded to him. He brought it over and put it on the table, and then retired to a point behind the curtains where he wouldn’t miss anything.

  Lieutenant Kelly turned to me.

  “That night—Monday—when you happened to come downstairs, you said you heard voices in the library. I thought at first maybe it was the radio, but I guess it was Trent telling Archer and Ellicott they could go to blazes. You see, he’d made a queer decision—he’d decided to come through clean, more or less. He and Archer were in one thing together, but in another he had the goods on Ellicott. Well, they heard somebody come down, and Ellicott slipped out and stood with his back to the window, pushing his hair back the way Spur does. They’re about the same size, and you didn’t know either of ’em well enough to tell the difference. But you sure had me going, trying to fit that in with the rest of it. Of course, that was Ellicott’s game—he had to pin it on Spur, and that gave him a swell chance.

  “Well, the break came when Doyle’s museum was robbed. I knew that was going to happen—or I guess I’d better just say I guessed it would. I was hot-footing it in town after Archer. Miss Cather and Ellicott and me went out to where his car had got stuck—and the minute we started up I knew Ellicott was the guy I was after. I guess you noticed that, lady?”

  I looked perfectly blank, and shook my head.

  “Well, now. When he started the car, his windshield wiper started going back and forth fifteen to the dozen. Well, I had a guard at the gate to keep cars from going out. And it hadn’t been raining when you came in from the movie, had it?”

  “No,” I said. “It didn’t start for quite a while.”

  “That’s right. Well, somebody had been somewhere in that car when there wasn’t supposed to be any gas in it, while it was raining, and came back and got out in such a hurry he didn’t notice he hadn’t switched off the wiper. And when we were starting off, Ellicott just reached up and turned it off, quick like. He’d have said something about it if somebody else had had the car out, and I was scared to death you’d notice it and say something about it. So I got out at the service station and phoned back to the house for ’em to get busy. They found somebody had thrown a gas can over in the bushes and somebody’d emptied a lot of gas on the road the night before. Well, I figured either he’d got away with what I was hunting for, or something else. When the old lady started bleating about paying fifty thousand dollars for a fifteen thousand place, I figured it was something else.

  “What was it? Well, Major Ellicott had slipped in town and had a shot at Mr. Doyle’s museum.”

  He was being maddeningly deliberate about it, but he had a rather strange air of plugging away doggedly at some point or other, and I waited for him as patiently as I could.

  “And I’m going to tell you all something. You can make fun of psychology if you want to, but I’m handing it to the Doc here. He knew Spur didn’t do these things. He told me. When Miss Cather and Ellicott were in town that night he said to come in the library and talk to him. Well, I was pretty suspicious about the story he’d fixed up about Spur, and the fact that he’d known Hutton, and then it was her that had introduced him to Mrs. Trent and so on, and that made me figure maybe the hundred fifty thousand dollar hospital they talked about was going to be his cut.”

  I glanced over at Dr. Sartoris, and saw that he was smiling with genuine appreciation. Mincing matters was certainly not one of Lieutenant Kelly’s many excellent qualities.

  “Well, now. That night he said to me, ‘Lootenant, that young fella never committed murder. I been probing his libido, and murder ain’t there, and that’s straight.’ “

  I’m very much afraid I laughed. Dr. Sartoris’s words sounded even worse in Lieutenant Kelly’s mouth than they had sounded in that of his late disciple Mrs. Trent.

  “Well, I got to thinking about that, and I said, ‘Thanks, Doc,’ and he said ‘That’s all right, it’s an interesting case.’ I guess that’s what he thought about it. I thought it was plain hell. So I went to town, and I came back. The next morning I went to town, and that’s when Ellicott’s windshield wiper started wiping like it was mad.”

  He stopped suddenly and untied the parcel in front of him. We all leaned forward. Even Cheryl moved her head and opened her eyes, blue and wide.

  “Well, now,” Lieutenant Kelly said. “What was that all about?”

  He hesitated, as if he were not quite sure of what was the best way to go about something; and it seemed to me suddenly as if there was something very dramatic and touching in the air.

  “Why did Major Ellicott pretend his car out there was crippled, and then sneak out and burgle Mr. Doyle’s museum?—I’ll just show you, because it’s rather interesting.”

  He began to take things out of the parcel that Magothy had brought in.

  “Now this here’s the gun that Michael Spur used that night fourteen years ago,” he said, holding it up. “It’s this gun that branded him, in the eyes of the world. I’m just going to call this gun Exhibit A.”

  He put it to one side on the table.

  “And this here, this is the bullet they took out of Stephen Spur’s body. We’ll just call this Exhibit B.”

  He put the little lead pellet by the revolver on the table.

  “And this here’s the bullet that killed Duncan Trent; and this is Major Ellicott’s service revolver—and we’re going to call them Exhibit C and Exhibit D.”

  He placed a second little lead pellet and a second revolver on the table by the others. We w
atched him silently. I didn’t dare to look at poor Michael Spur; and you could have heard a dogwood petal fall, it was so silent in that room.

  “Well,” Lieutenant Kelly said deliberately, “Dr. Sartoris was right when he said there wasn’t any murder in Michael Spur. In nineteen-nineteen they hadn’t found out how to fingerprint bullets. They couldn’t tell what bullet came from what gun. But we can do it now; and I just thought it might be a pretty good idea to have it done here. And Vm telling you the bullet that killed Michael Spur’s father never came from Michael Spur’s revolver. Exhibit B and Exhibit C—the bullets that killed Stephen Spur and Duncan Trent—were fired from Major Ellicott’s revolver, Exhibit D. One of ’em was fired fourteen years ago, and one of ’em was fired four days ago—but they was both fired from the same gun.”

  We sat there speechless, staring at the whitehaired old man, standing there unshaved and weary, clothed with the simple dignity of Justice.

  And then he came round the table and put his hand on Michael Spur’s shoulder.

  “Son,” he said gently, “you never killed your father.”

  There was an instant’s breathless silence. Then Michael gave a great sob, and his hands groped blindly across the scattered pieces of the jigsaw puzzle for Cheryl’s, and he dropped his head in her cool cupped hands. She bent forward gently, her face radiant, her eyes as clear as blue heaven, and kissed the top of his bent head.

  “Michael dear!” she murmured, and he held her hands very tight.

  Lieutenant Kelly blew his nose violently with his large purple silk handkerchief.

  “Well,” he said gruffly, “I guess there ain’t much more. Ellicott told Miss Cather he’d killed three people. He could of said four. I had them test the bullet we took from his own body—it checks with Exhibit B and Exhibit C. And that’s why Dick Ellicott had to get into town that night and get the gun and the bullet out of Doyle’s museum. That was evidence aginst him that they’d been holding there for fourteen years. Doyle didn’t know it—hadn’t any way of knowing it at the time, and he just hadn’t thought of it since.