The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  “I haven’t moved him at all,” the doc said. He turned to his little black bag, took out some cotton and a bottle of something or other. Moistening the cotton with whatever was in the bottle, he swabbed off all his fingers carefully and stood up. “He’s dead, of course. Burned to death, apparently. The burns are very severe. The muscles of the upper back and shoulders seem to have been almost entirely consumed. The left scapula is calcined.” He closed his bag and came over to us. “How did this happen?” He, too, seemed to feel the same incredulity that had affected Jerry and me and Prexy. “I never saw such burns before.”

  I started to say something, but Hanlon silenced me with a wave of his hand. “Doc, can ye think of any way that such burns could be caused? The poor fella’s half cooked.”

  Nickerson shook his head. “It seems almost as though a blow-torch had been held at his back.”

  Hanlon took him up on that. “Thin he must ’a’ been dead whin it was used on him?”

  But the doctor was being conservative. “I can’t tell. Obviously, there will have to be an autopsy.”

  “Perhaps heart failure . . .” Jerry’s voice was tentative.

  “It’s impossible to tell anything now. But LeNormand came to me a few days ago for a going-over. He did that every year. He was sound as a nut last Tuesday.”

  “Ye don’t tell me.” Hanlon’s voice sounded a trifle disappointed. Jerry said, “Doc, could those burns have been made with a chemical?”

  “A chemical? What have you got in mind?”

  “Something like thermite.”

  It was a new idea to Nickerson. He paused. “I don’t know. I don’t know the effect of the stuff at all.”

  “They use it in welding,” Jerry explained. “And the Italian aviators used something like it on the Abyssinians. It’s a mixture of powdered aluminum and iron oxide.”

  Nickerson rubbed his ear thoughtfully. “A chemical analysis of the calcined matter and the edges of the clothing ought to settle the point. But I didn’t see any slag. Still, it’s an idea.”

  Hanlon glanced quickly at Jerry. “Ye’ve a theory, young feller.”

  “No,” said Jerry. “Not even a hunch. Something must have done it, though.”

  “Isn’t it possible,” I ventured, “that the thing is an accident? He could have put his pipe, lighted, into his pocket.”

  Nickerson shook his head. “I don’t see it. Even if he had accidentally set fire to his clothes, and even if they had been soaked in gasoline, I don’t believe he could have been burned like that.” He turned to the Chief. “Do you want me to do anything more?”

  Hanlon fidgeted a little in his chair. “Well, maybe you better wait till Parsons gets here. He’s head of county detectives. Likely he’ll have Doc Merritt with him. The two of yez can maybe put yer heads together and figure the mess out.”

  “All right,” said Nickerson.

  We found him a chair, and he sat down with us. Silence descended again. I had expected that Hanlon would keep firing questions at us, try to shake our story, try to “break” the case right away. Instead, he did nothing. For a time I was puzzled, even vaguely uneasy about his inactivity, and then the obvious answer occurred to me. Collegeville is owned, body and soul, by the University. Hanlon was shrewd enough to see that this affair would create tremendous excitement and perhaps a scandal; whoever tackled it would be opening a hornets’ nest without gloves. His tiny department was not fitted, any more than he himself, to handle a situation of this sort. He was playing it safe; he was going to turn the case over, untouched and unhandled, to Parsons.

  When the county men arrived, they appeared to approve of his decisions. Parsons was a slow, calm, neutral sort of man, but he knew his job. He turned Merritt, the county doctor, loose on the corpse. He had photographs taken of every inch of the observatory building. He had every surface tested for fingerprints, and took ours, Hanlon’s, Nickerson’s, and Pudge’s. He sent a man over to Prexy’s house to ask him if he’d mind coming back at once. After listening once to Jerry’s story and mine, separately, he noted down our stadium ticket numbers, and listed the people we’d noticed at the game who might be able to corroborate our presence. He studied the floor, the walls, and every piece of furniture in the room. He took a note of the company that manufactured the fire extinguisher Jerry had used. A man was sent out to examine the ground outside the building under the dome opening. He put us through our stories a second time and a third. He hammered and hammered at us, patiently explaining that our story was not very likely. He suggested that we might care to supplement it. When Prexy appeared, he talked quietly with him for a long time, nodding his head from time to time and glancing over at us or at the place where LeNormand’s body had been before his men had taken it away. After Prexy left, he climbed up to the dome slot himself and summoned the fingerprint man after him. He was all over the place, remorselessly, efficiently, and unhurriedly.

  It all took a lot of time. Somewhere around midnight he turned to us.

  “I don’t want to make this any harder for you two than I have to,” he said. “I don’t want to lock you up. You’re the only witnesses I’ve got, and your story is fishy as hell. But I can’t find anything to incriminate either of you so far. By morning we’ll have the results of the autopsy, and perhaps some new information. I’ll have to go over the whole thing with you again. So you’ll have to stay in town tonight. Where are you going to sleep?”

  Jerry and I sighed. We had seen this coming. Jerry told him, “We can stay at the Lodge—our fraternity house, the Zeta Kappas.”

  Hanlon nodded. He knew the Zete house, all right. Parsons seemed not too pleased by the suggestion.

  “We can get a bed there, and borrow razors and staff in the morning,” I urged. “It’s too late to find any place else.”

  Parsons was still dubious. “Well, I dunno.”

  Hanlon was on our side. “Sure, Mr. Parsons, the b’ys are roight. They’ll be asy to find in the mornin, and it’s the sinsible place fer thim to go.”

  “Oke.” Parsons wasted no more thought on us. “I’ll send a man around to the Zeta house in the morning, when I want you. Stay there till you hear from me. On your way, now.”

  We went down the iron stairs numbly. As we left the room we heard him telling Chief Hanlon to arrange an interview in the morning with himself, Prexy, and Mrs. LeNormand, and do it diplomatically. Even the great Parsons was sensible of how much power the President of the University has, and it was plain that he was anxious to offend no one.

  Outside, both of us drew in great lungfuls of the icy air. It felt almost like getting out of jail to be walking alone across the campus. Without our coats we felt cold, but something of the oppression that had settled on us back there in Eldridge Observatory began to lift. The ringing in my ears diminished, and my legs felt a little less leaden.

  “This is an improvement,” Jerry said after a while.

  I remarked that the air smelled good. It was not the most felicitous possible observation.

  “Poor devil,” Jerry muttered. “Hell of a way to die. I hope they get the bastard that did it . . .”

  “Amen.”

  “Married, by God. Married. Bark, what could have got into LeNormand? He had no more use for women than the Sultan’s right-hand man. LeNormand was all brain. What do you suppose was in his mind?”

  “Prexy said she is the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  “Not quite. He said some people might think so. And remember the Queen.” “The Queen” was campus slang for Mrs. Murray.

  We agreed that Prexy might be prejudiced. But neither of us could explain LeNormand’s having taken a wife. Jerry thought that if she was half as beautiful as Prexy said she might provide the motive, and the idea seemed to give him a good deal of satisfaction.

  “And, Bark,” he concluded, “as long as there’s this other angle I’m not going to say anything about the row over LeNormand’s work. I don’t want to stir up that kind of mess, and there’s probab
ly nothing in it anyway. The best thing for us to do is to answer all their questions and volunteer nothing at all.”

  “I’m with you there,” I told him. “But it’s up to you. You’re the one who knows the inside story.”

  “Let’s not talk about it any more,” he said, and we walked along in silence through the dark.

  By and by we came to the Zete house. The brethren were in good voice by then, and the victory over State was being properly solemnized. We went up the front steps and rang the bell, shivering. A pledge came out, and we identified ourselves. Buzz Clark, the chapter president, came into the hall to greet us. He was magnificently cordial, but he would have welcomed a tax collector in the same effusive way by that time. He told us to hang up our hats and come in and have a drink. We declined, and asked if there were a couple of beds in the house. He asked us gravely where the ladies were. We told him to go to hell. It went on like that for quite a while. Buzz shouted to the pledge to bring us a couple of drinks, but we wouldn’t take them.

  “My God,” he said finally. “You guys lose your grip fast after you get out of this place.”

  We admitted that we were not the men we used to be in college, but insisted that for a couple of elderly wrecks like ourselves bed was the only place. He took us upstairs finally, and turned us into an empty room. I can’t remember undressing or getting into bed.

  I stopped speaking and began to sift the sand of my memory once again, hoping and yet half afraid that I had missed telling some small fact, some nuance of word, some impression of eye or mind that might provide the key to the answer. There was nothing.

  “That’s how it was,” I said slowly. “I’ve told you everything, Dad.”

  Dr. Lister was leaning forward, his forearms on the table, staring at the topaz star that the candlelight kindled in the sherry bottle.

  “Yes,” he replied. “I think you have. All three of us have considered the matter a hundred times. Parsons, too, is a great detective in his way. There is nothing to go on, no clues, nothing but incredibilities.” He repeated the word softly. “Incredibilities.”

  “There is an answer,” I told him, “but I think the answer itself is an incredibility.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I know that Jerry found the answer, and that having found it he killed himself.”

  He made an impatient gesture. “Why? Because he was afraid to tell it? That’s not like Jerry.”

  “No, I don’t think that was it. I have a feeling that he did what he did—(the lifted gun, the flat, hard crack of the report echoing in that Western room)—because he was afraid to have us, or anyone, learn the answer. Afraid that he might tell the truth. A truth he was afraid to have us know.”

  He poured us each another glass of sherry. “Are you too tired to go on? Shall we wait till morning? It must be almost eleven o’clock now.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not too tired. I don’t want to shut my eyes.”

  We woke about nine the next morning. I was surprised at how well I felt after a shower, a shave with Buzz Clark’s razor, and a good breakfast. Neither of us had a hangover, and though I felt a little lazy and weak in the legs, I found that I was ready for anything the day might bring. Jerry, too, was less grave and preoccupied. We went into the library and read the morning papers. There was nothing in them about LeNormand’s death; the story had apparently broken too late, at least, for the out-of-town editions. We read the account of the game the day before. As usual, the papers carried the story as if the game had been a moral victory for State, but they always dislike us, and even bias could not conceal the fact that we’d been on the long end of the score. Bill Bonham’s account in the Record contained a passage I still remember and which confirmed my feeling about that first quarter:

  State punched out its first-quarter touchdown with an impressive display of power and old-fashioned football. The boys from Brunswick took the ball deep in their own territory, and in a series of pile-driver bucks and slants drove down to the University twelve-yard line, where Stanwicz heaved the leather dead into the arms of Moroney for the score. The advance had the crowd breathless, and toward the end you could have heard a pin drop in the big bowl . . .

  “Toward the end you could have heard a pin drop.” He was right, and it recalled to me the odd sense of tension, the surcharge of human emotion and passion I had felt so strongly the afternoon before.

  Parsons sent for us as we finished with the papers. Apparently he had shifted his base of operations, for the car drew up in front of the imitation Gothic town hall—in Collegeville everything tries to match the University’s style—and we were shown into the police station in the wing at the right.

  To my surprise, Prexy was there, and so was Doc Nickerson. Parsons was sitting at a long table with a lot of papers spread out in front of him. He looked gray-faced and deadly tired, but he mustered up a smile for us.

  “Sit down, boys. There’s nothing formal about this. Just want to ask you a few more questions.”

  Prexy cleared his threat authoritatively. “I am quite sure, gentlemen, that you will not require the presence of a lawyer at this hearing. Nevertheless, if you wish to have legal advice, you are entitled to demand it.”

  “That’s all right,” Jerry said as we took a couple of chairs. “Go ahead, Mr. Parsons.”

  “When you walked toward the door of the observatory you had it in full view?”

  “Yes, though of course it was dark and there was only the one light, and we weren’t watching it consciously—”

  “But you are both still positive that no one came out of that door during the time you were walking toward it?”

  Jerry paused. “Neither of us saw anyone. The odds are that one of us was looking toward the door every second of the way.”

  “Then, from the time you approached the observatory, you don’t believe anyone could have left it without attracting your attention?” Parsons seemed to be aiming the question at me.

  “Well,” I said, “not through the door. Somebody might have got out through the slot in the dome.”

  “They didn’t,” said Parsons grimly. “There’s a wide bed of plants on that side of the building, and anybody leaving that way would be sure to leave traces. There aren’t any.”

  Suddenly Jerry stiffened beside me and leaned forward. “There is one way that someone could have got out of the building without our knowing it.”

  Prexy looked surprised, but Parsons smiled. “Aha!” Then, after a pause, “Well, Mr. Lister?”

  “Whoever did it might have sneaked down the stairs when he heard us at the door, and gone into one of the classrooms. They were dark and we didn’t look in there. Then, when we went up the stairs, he could have slipped out and made his escape.”

  Parsons looked triumphant. “You’ve got a head on your shoulders. What do you say, Mr. Jones?”

  I was puzzled. “I can’t see any reason why it isn’t possible,” I replied.

  “But you don’t think it was that way. Why not?”

  “Well,” I struggled to find words for an intangible impression, “when we entered the hall I glanced at the two dark open doors of those classrooms. There may have been somebody in one of them, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt like an empty house.” Putting it that way sounded silly to me, but Parsons nodded encouragingly.

  “Yes,” he said, “I know the feeling you mean. I often rely on it myself. But in this case,” he looked at us all thoughtfully, “I think we have to decide that that is how the murderer got out of the building.”

  “The murderer,” Jerry said. “So you’re sure it is murder?”

  “There wasn’t a trace of any organic defect to make it anything else,” said Doc Nickerson.

  “Did you look for traces of chemical?” Jerry’s voice was eager.

  “Of course, we can’t be positive this early” (the Doc’s voice was positive though), “but I couldn’t find a trace of any such agency. I tested for thermite—” here he grinned a
t the two of us “—and I’m almost certain nothing of the sort was used. Of course, we won’t be sure until the analyst’s report comes in.”

  “So there goes your theory,” observed Parsons with a certain satisfaction. “Now, young feller,” he went on with a pointed look at Jerry, “from what you said last night and what I’ve been able to find out, you used to be a friend of the professor’s. That right?”

  Jerry nodded. “Yes, I suppose so. As much of a friend as he ever had, I think.” I noticed Prexy frown a moment at this.

  “Then”—Parson’s voice seemed to me to contain an entreaty concealed under its brusqueness—“what about any enemies? Did anyone hate him, do you know?”

  “Not to the best of my knowledge.”

  “You don’t know of any personal rows he may have had?”

  Jerry rubbed his palms together. “Well, he did have an argument with some other astronomers and physicists. But he stopped it of his own accord. In a way, he sort of gave in.”

  “Ah. What was this row about?”

  “Professor LeNormand wrote a paper called ‘A Fundamental Critique of the Einstein Space-Time Continuum.’ Some of the men in other universities and foundations disagreed with him.”

  “And the row was over that?” Parsons sounded disappointed. “It wasn’t really a row. It was a scientific argument.”

  Prexy said smoothly, “That was over two years ago. I am quite sure the whole thing was a closed issue. We all admired LeNormand’s work enormously, but the feeling about the paper was that he had left the—er—solid world of scientific fact a bit too far behind him in this work.”

  Parsons nodded. “It’s the kind of murder motive I’ve never been able to believe in myself.” He was silent for several minutes, apparently trying to think of another question to ask us that would make sense. Finally he picked up two folders of typewritten papers. “Here are a couple of statements, one for each of you. Read ’em over and sign ’em.” He shoved them across the table at Jerry and me.

  We read them carefully. In mine, at least, there was nothing that I had not said, and that was not, so far as I know, the literal truth. I signed on the last page, and Jerry did the same with his. Parsons gathered them in, inspected the signatures, and jotted down our New York address.